The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a standard protocol for interfacing external application software with a web server.

The task of such a server is to respond to requests (in the case of web servers, requests from client web browsers) by returning output. Each time a request is received, the server analyzes what the request asks for, and returns the appropriate output.

Web servers often have a cgi-bin directory at the base of the directory tree to hold executable files called with CGI.

The program returns the result to the web server in the form of standard output.

CGI can be written in Perl, ASP, PHP, C, C++, Linux shell, Java, C#, Lisp, Pascal, Modula etc.

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