You need to put two things into your httpd.conf file. First, to tell apache what an executable is you need to put in something like:

AddHandler cgi-script cgi pl
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This tells apache that any file with the extension cgi or pl is a cgi script. This still doesn't mean that your scripts will run, you also have to tell apache where you intend to run scripts from, what is called your cgi-bin directory.

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /home/thing/www/cgi-bin/
<Directory /home/thing/www/cgi-bin>
    Options +ExecCGI
</Directory>
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What this does is, first, tell apache where to look for files when the it gets a request like www.thing.com/cgi-bin/myscript.pl and the other three lines tell apache that it is ok to run scripts found in that directory.

Finally, apache runs as a user. Therefore it is important that that user has read and execute (but not write) permissions for these directories and files.

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