Perl was originally designed to be a interpreter to help UNIX users with common tasks. However, with the explosive growth of the Internet it has been adapted to be an excellent interface to the web.

Perl has become the preferred programming language for making websites dynamic and user interactive. For example, you can use Perl to grab the data from your webpage forms and perhaps write this data to a file (as in a guestbook) or send it to you via E-mail (as in a form). We will discuss some of the basic principles to running PERL.

Because of the enormous popularity surrounding Perl, many websites have becomed devoted to its growing success by offering free CGI/Perl scripts to visitors. The following list of websites offers quality CGI/Perl scripts that have been tested on our server, ranked in descending order.

If you plan on running or linking to CGI scripts using the above method, set your permissions accordingly: CGI FILE -- 700 or (Owner=execute/write/read, group=nothing, world=nothing)

DATA FILE that the script writes to but is not viewed on the web) -- 600 or (Owner=write/read, group=nothing, world=nothing)

DATA FILE that the script writes to and is viewed on the web (example: guestbook) -- 644 or (Owner=read/write, group=read, world=read)

The above permissions will ensure MAXIMUM security.

Note: NEVER set your permissions on a file or directory to 777 as our server will not allow the script to execute because of the potential security hazard.