Sun Microsystems Netscape Enterprise Server, Administrator'S Manual

Page: 279 / 532

Chapter 11, Extending Your Server With Programs 279
Installing CGI Programs
Overview of CGI
Common Gateway Interface, or CGI, programs can be defined with any number
of programming languages. On a Unix machine, you’re likely to find CGI
programs written as Bourne shell or Perl scripts.
Note
Under Unix, there are extra CGIStub processes running that the server uses to
aid in CGI execution. These processes are created only during the first access to
a CGI. Their number varies depending upon the CGI load on the server. Do not
kill these CGIStub processes. They disappear when the server is stopped.
For more information see the discussion regarding
MinCGIStub
,
MaxCGIStub
, and
CGIStubIdleTimeout
in “CGIStub Processes (Unix),” on
page 227 in Chapter 10, “Configuring the Server for Performance.”
On a Windows NT computer, you might find CGI programs written in C++ or
batch files. For Windows NT, CGI programs written in a Windows-based
programming language such as Visual Basic use a different mechanism to
operate with the server. They are called Windows NT CGI programs. See
“Installing Windows NT CGI Programs” on page 282 for information about
Windows NT CGI.
Note
In order to run the command-line utilities, you need to manually set the
Path
variable to include
<server_root>/bin/https/bin
.
Regardless of the programming language, all CGI programs accept and return
data in the same manner. For information about writing CGI programs see the
following sources of information:
• The Common Gateway Interface at:
http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/overview.html
• Articles about CGI available on Netscape’s DevEdge online documentation
web site at:
http://developer.netscape.com/docs/articles/index.html?content=cgi.html
There are two ways to store CGI programs on your server machine:
• Specify a directory that contains only CGI programs. All files are run as
programs regardless of the file extensions.