Shell CGI

For simple scripts shell is pretty good. You have the permission problems to deal with. The Apache2 configuration with .htaccess is straight forward:

Options +ExecCGI
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi

The important element to shell CGI scripts in to ensure you have "Content-Type: text/html" in there with a couple of carriage returns.

#!/bin/sh

title="Shell CGI"

cat <<END
Cache-Control: no-cache
Content-Type: text/html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8" />
        <title>$title</title>
    </head>
<body>
<pre>
END

wget http://webconverger.com/flower100.png &> /dev/stdout || echo "Permission denied"
env

cat <<END
</pre>
</body>
</html>
END

/dev/stderr outputs to /var/log/apache2/error.log so you need redirect wget output to stdout as I do in this case.