
Ask HN: Does anyone use CGI scripts anymore? - kaishiro
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?
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LinuxBender
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.

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stevekemp
Yes. I write a lot of scripts using the Perl CGI::Application framework, and
that uses FastCGI to boot up.

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.

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twobyfour
Oh, wow, there's a flashback. Nope, haven't used CGI in almost exactly a
decade.

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.

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technion
cPanel still puts this there by default - your hosting provider may not even
be aware of it in a modern environment.

