Sooner or later every webmaster needs CGI.

It is difficult to imagine the website maintainence with out CGI.

CGI scripts might be used to process a simple form to maintaining a membership area.There are many scripts online, which could be used to automate your internet site .

**Form proccessing **Autoresponders
**Order grasping , Order proccessing **Steamline your downloads **Protecting your private folders **Easy maintanence of the internet page **Tracking your advertisements **Maintaining an affiliate site **Counters, classifieds, link directories... There is no end to this list.

But the problem with cgi scripts is how to install on your servers?

You dont have to learn perl or write scripts on your own to maintain your CGIs.

As a webmaster of your page you absolutely need to know about installing scripts for yourself.Otherwise you will finish up with paying hundreds of dollars for script installations.

Basic THREE steps that you should check during cgi installations are:

1.UPLOADING OF FILES:

CGI files should be uploaded in ASCII mode.In this mode the end-of-line character translated properly and the code lines are transfered in proper format.(In BINARY mode, the characters will not be translated.Instead they are transfered exactly as a duplicates)

Tip:DONT run your FTP software in automode to upload cgi files.Set it to ASCII mode manually and upload the files.

2.CONFIGURING THE SCRIPTS:

When you buy a code , you have to set few variables. So that the code runs correctly on your server.

When you doing this, you should have an idea about your
server perl paths,absolute paths, URLs etc.

The URLs are case sensitive.

Scriptname.cgi
scriptname.cgi
scriptname.pl
Scriptname.pl

All four are taken differently by your server.

3.FILE PERMISSIONS:

Once you upload files, do not rush to run the program.

Set and check the file permissions.

If you do not set the permissions to cgi or pl files, the server doesnt get access to your files and you will see 500 Internal server bad choice .

Most of the times cgi files absolutely need to be 755.

Always check the directions of the program providers.

If you are keeping an eye on these three steps,you can do your program installations!