There's nothing like a bunch of jargon to make you feel dumb. Here's what it all means...
CGI - Common Gateway Interface. The standard
way for a Web server to send and receive data to and from the
user
cgi-bin - the most common name for the directory on your
Web server where CGI scripts are uploaded to.
chmod - a Unix program that changes the permissions on
files. See 'file permissions'.
file permissions - Unix files and directories are given
permissions to say who can read and write to them, as well as
if they can be executed. Perl scripts and cgi-bin directories
should have their permissions set to 755, which indicates anyone
can read and execute them, but only their owner can write to them.
Host - a company that provides space on their Web server.
If you're using CGI and Perl, you must make sure your host is
set up to let you run your scripts on their server. See the Resources
section
Open Source - a licensing model that states that the source
code of the software must be freely available, enabling anyone
to modify it and contribute to the software's development. See
www.opensource.org
Perl - Practical Extraction and Reporting Language (or
Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister). A scripting language
created by Larry Wall to handle Unix system administration tasks.
Rapidly became a popular CGI programming language, and has been
referred to as 'the glue of the Internet'
Web server - a computer that sends Web pages to a user's
browser. There are many different Web server programs available,
including IIS for Windows 2000, Apache and Xitami