"A great deal of Linux users have heard about PHP, the Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP is the engine behind many dynamic Web sites, including this one, Linux.com. Recently, a friend of mine asked a few general questions about PHP. I thought that it would be worthwhile to share my responses with our readers."

"What is PHP?"

"PHP is a scripting language, much like Perl or Python, which is embedded in HTML to create dynamic Web sites. PHP's syntax is drawn mostly from C and Perl. According to Netcraft, PHP is being used by over a million domains on the Internet."

"Is PHP a safer alternative to CGI?"

"You can run into security problems with some CGI implementations. If you develop a CGI script in C, for example, you could run into buffer overflows which lead to root exploits. Similarly, you can run into security problems if malicious users cause Perl scripts to invoke processes on the server system."

Complete Story

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