CGI Under Your Own Home Page (Personal Webpage)

Purpose 

This article has instructions to set up CGI for your personal webpages. We allow CGI access under personal webpages with the following restrictions:

• Scripts are limited to 9 seconds of CPU time.
• The Office of Information Technology cannot assist with specific CGI programming issues or instructions.

Setting up CGI

1. Connect to Giant and navigate to ~/public_html.
2. Type mkdir cgi-bin. This creates a directory for your CGI scripts.
3. Type chmod 755 cgi-bin. This sets correct permissions for the directory.
4. Type cd cgi-bin. This moves to the new CGI script directory.
5. Write your script.

• If you want to use PHP, then it should be embedded in the html file with:

<?php

..

?>

• Your scripts must be executable. chmod u+x scriptname.php.
• The first line of your PHP script must be #!/usr/local/bin/php.
• If using PERL, your script must begin with #!/usr/local/bin/perl.

6. Execute your script at https://personal.utdallas.edu/~netid/cgi-bin/scriptname.