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Ask HN: Does anyone use CGI scripts anymore?

5 pointsby kaishiroalmost 8 years ago
Just curious - doing a quick landing page for a client on shared hosting and another dev and I were just remarking on the reliable old &#x2F;cgi-bin dir laying about the docroot.<p>In my entire career I&#x27;ve never used it - does anyone still use CGI scripts on a day to day basis? If so, what for?

4 comments

LinuxBenderalmost 8 years ago
I use it for my own sites, mostly for file uploading, forums, etc... We use them at work in simple cases where writing something in java or C would have been overkill. CGI will be around for a very long time.
stevekempalmost 8 years ago
Yes. I write a lot of scripts using the Perl CGI::Application framework, and that uses FastCGI to boot up.<p>It might not be sexy, but it is easy to test, and allows me to use a wide array of Perl modules in my codebase.
twobyfouralmost 8 years ago
Oh, wow, there&#x27;s a flashback. Nope, haven&#x27;t used CGI in almost exactly a decade.<p>We used to use them for formmail scripts and collecting email addresses for mailing lists on otherwise static websites. Once I convinced that employer to move our clients to hosting that supported PHP (yes, PHP - this was 2006-2007 after all), and to gradually migrate them onto content management systems, CGI became unnecessary.
technionalmost 8 years ago
cPanel still puts this there by default - your hosting provider may not even be aware of it in a modern environment.