What is cgi-exec? Version 3 cgi-exec is a compiled program that does the following things: determines the name of the html document that referred the browser to it; finds a resource directory containing a text table and scripts; looks up the name of the referring document in a table created by the cgi programmer; acquires the name of the script to be executed as specified in the table; determines if there is data intended for the script to be executed; acquires, parses, and decodes the data from cgi-encodement to plain text; sets environmental variables to the values passed to it from the html form, using the fieldname in the form as the name of the environmental variable; takes measures to prevent the overwriting of previously existing environmental variables; prints out header specified on the command line (none, text/plain, text/html); forks and executes the script, which inherits the enriched environment; prints out any footer required by the header previously printed, if any; exits, and returns control to the web server. cgi-exec does not do the following things: it does not check your input--it merely decodes it. you are still responsible for checking your input and guarding your script from failure because of unexpected data. Copyright (c) 2000, 2003 William F. Simmons. All rights reserved.