CGI or Common Gateway Interface is a standard used to interface applications or scripts running on a web server with the web server application itself, to ensure that the script or application can receive input from your web browser and that the output of the script can influence the web page content.

The most common scripting language used for CGI scripts is Perl, but any language that you have available on your web server can be used to write CGI programs. Just make sure, you know what you are doing, as most attacks on web servers either attack the CGI interface itself or utilise bugs in CGI programs.

Most current large scale web based applications do no longer use the basic CGI approach but use either PHP or ASP.
 

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