What is the relationship between CGI-Executables and cgi-bin?

Question

I am trying to get CGIs working locally on my Mac and am having difficulty understanding the relationship between CGI-Executables/ and cgi-bin/.
I have activated CGI in my httpd.conf file, and have the following perl test script: /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/test.cgi file, and have the file permissions set appropriatly
If I call the script from the actual url: http://127.0.0.1/CGI-Executables/test.cgi, it doesn't work. If I use: http://127.0.0.1/cgi-bin/test.cgi, it works fine.
Why cgi-bin and not CGI-Executables? What is the relationship between /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/ and cgi-bin?
And how do I get CGIs working in individual users' Sites/ file? Do all CGIs go in the /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/ directory, or can each users' Site/ directory have it's own cgi-bin?
Ti Powerbook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.4)  

Answer 1

Now I am having trouble getting CGI to work in the user directories. I have a perl script that works for 127.0.0.1/cgi-bin/test.cgi, but not for 127.0.0.1/~joe/cgi-bin/test.cgi.
My apache error log says:
[Tue Feb 14 08:14:23 2006] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Options ExecCGI is off in this directory: /Users/joe/Sites/cgi-bin/first.cgi
Permissions for Library/WebServer/CGI-Exectuables/test.cgi and /Users/joe/Sites/cgi-bin/ are 777.
I think the problem is somewhere in my directory configs. Apache has so many, it's hard to know what's what.
Here's the first directory directives in httpd.conf:
# First, we configure the "default" to be a very restrictive set of
# permissions.
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride Options
</Directory>
Farther down, there's this, which I added ExecCGI and index.cgi:
# Control access to UserDir directories. The following is an example
# for a site where these directories are restricted to read-only.
<Directory /Users/*/Sites>
AllowOverride FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
Options MultiViews Indexes SymLinksIfOwnerMatch Includes ExecCGI
DirectoryIndex index.html index.cgi
<Limit GET POST OPTIONS PROPFIND>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Limit>
<LimitExcept GET POST OPTIONS PROPFIND>
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
</LimitExcept>
</Directory>
Then down at the bottom of the file is something I suspect was added automatically when the user account was created:
Include /private/etc/httpd/users/*.conf
<Directory "/Users/joe/Sites/">
Options Indexes MultiViews Includes
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
To further confuse things, there is another file /etc/httpd/user/joe.conf that has additional user-directory directives:
<Directory "/Users/joe/Sites/">
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
Is there something in all these directory configurations that is preventing the user from accessing cgi-bin? Can I add directives to an .htaccess file in the user directory.
Ti Powerbook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.4)