Frequently Asked Questions

I need to know where to find Sendmail. Where is it?
I want to use Perl. Where is it?
What is better, PHP or CGI?
What is Perl? How does it differ from CGI?
What is PHP?

I need to know where to find Sendmail. Where is it?

The current location of Sendmail: /usr/sbin/sendmail

For future reference, you can determine the location of Sendmail by typing "which sendmail" from a telnet command prompt. The system will display Sendmail's location.

I want to use Perl. Where is it?

The current location of Perl: /usr/bin/perl

For future reference, you can determine the location of Perl by typing "which perl" from a telnet command prompt. The system will display Perl's location.

What is better, PHP or CGI?

It depends who you ask. PHP was designed with the web in mind, where Perl is more of a general purpose language. PHP has many built-in facilities for common web applications such as sending mail, connecting to databases, form handling, etc. PHP is much easier to integrate and embed into existing HTML, while Perl can be better for large programming projects.

Programming languages are like tools in a toolbox. Seasoned web developers have to pick the proper tool to complete the job.

References: PHP vs CGI

What is Perl? How does it differ from CGI?

Perl is a high-level programming language that was derived from a countless number of tools, languages and operating systems. Perl is quite powerful, and is installed on most Unix servers.

CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface. CGI is a standard for interfacing external applications with web servers. A CGI program is executed to output dynamic information. CGI programs can be written in many different languages: Perl, C/C++, TCL, Visual Basic and AppleScript to name a few.

So really, Perl and CGI are actually two completely different things. Perl is a common programming language in which to implement CGI programs.

References: NCSA CGI Introduction

What is PHP?

According to the official PHP webpage:

"PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language. Much of its syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl with a couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown in. The goal of the language is to allow web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly."

A decent comparison of PHP and other languages can be found within PHP's FAQ page.

References: Introduction To PHP, PHP Home Page