|
We happen to know that "cgi-bin" refers to a certain type of directory found on web servers. Just as you might name a directory "img" if it contained images, or "text" if it contained text files, webmasters create directories titled "cgi-bin" to contain programs that let you do things via web pages. But why "cgi-bin," you might ask? Unlike the two previous examples, it's definitely a little arcane, we'll admit, but there is a method to the madness. Here's how we found out: The hyphen suggests that the term has two parts, so we broke it up and first searched on the term "cgi." That led us to the Yahoo! category World
Wide Web > Common Gateway Interface. Aha! CGI is an acronym for "Common Gateway Interface." To find out exactly what that meant, we visited the category and clicked on the Common Gateway Interface site, which happens to have a sunglasses icon ( ) next to the title, meaning it has been judged as highly valuable within its category. We learned that Common Gateway Interface is "a standard for interfacing external applications with information servers." That fits nicely into our understanding of the "cgi-bin" directory, which holds those "applications" or programs while they wait to be executed via web pages (the "information servers"). Lastly, we needed to
know what the "bin" stands for. We doubted that it meant "bin" as in "laundry bin" or "dustbin." So we did another search. This time our Yahoo! search didn't pan out -- too many other uses of those three letters. That meant we had to go to a specific reference site. One of our favorites is called PC Webopaedia, a computing dictionary of terms, acronyms, and phrases related to technology. We searched for "bin" in the Webopaedia and, sure enough, we hit paydirt! "Bin" is an abbreviation for binary and is used as "a name for directories that contain files stored in binary format -- computer-readable but not human-readable files." Case closed.
|
