Short overview of the CGI calling process
Before you try to find answers to specific problems you have to understand how CGI programs are executed on the server. There is no magic behind the Common Gateway Interface, it is just a standardized specification for interfacing external applications with information servers, such as HTTP or Web servers. The current version of this specification is CGI/1.1 and all the information in this article refers to this version. All recent servers follow this specification and if you want to get into technical detail (you should sooner or later) you can find it at http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/interface.html
This specification is usually called the Standard CGI Interface because it uses Standard Input (STDIN) and Standard Output (STDOUT) to read and send the data. There is another form of CGI which is called Win CGI, this is a specification for the same purpose but tailored to Windows servers.
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