The cgi-bin is used to help keep systems
secure. Keeping CGI scripts limited to
trusted users is necessary since CGI opens up
a lot of security risks. Therefore, most web
platforms allow only files inside of a
cgi-bin to be executed. This can be changed
and on many machines a .cgi extension has
been implemented to let anyone use CGI
scripts in their directory simply by changing
the filenames to have .cgi extension. If this
has not been enabled on your system and you
don't have a cgi-bin already, ask your system
administer if you can have access to execute
CGI scripts on your server.