[computing] Acronym for Common Gateway Interface. A standard for scripts that run external programs from a World Wide Web server. CGI typically specifies how to pass arguments to the program via HTTP requests; defines a set of environmental variables made available to the program; and generates output, usually in HTML format, that is passed back to the browser. CGI scripts are frequently designed to access information in a database and format the results as HTML, convert information retrieved from an interactive Web page into a database, send datasets, and so on.