• When a CGI script is called by a URL is it executed by a "wrapper" program which checks for certain conditions before the script actually runs. This is designed to prevent people from running scripts which do nasty things.
• If you obey the rules your scripts can run from your own web directory instead of from the CGI-BIN directory.

Create an .htaccess file.
This is an essential step for getting CGI working on fargo. Because of the way our server is set up, this file needs to be present for CGI to work from your home directory. The web server program looks for a file of this name in any directory from which it serves pages, and the file gives specific configuration information. Your .htaccess file will look something like this:

If you want more documentation, you'll need to read a bit of documentation about configuring your scripts, helpfully written by Tom Igoe. This information is a useful reference, but it was created a while ago. For up-to-date information, talk to someone in the CGI class, or post a message with your question to the ITP-Students mailing list.