Yes you can run it on the command-line. The problem is they (digichat) want 1500$ for the application that does this.....ouch!!!

There must be a better solution and cheaper as well.

Here is a post based on this topic.

============

Use backticks but be aware that also a shell is started each time (losing time too). There are better solutions using fork, exec etc. but they are more complex:
## Saving output in string
$output = `digichat.commander arguments ..`;

## Saving output in Array
@output = `digichat.commander arguments ..`;


>> Is it true that the commander will consume a lot of cpu resources because it would be invoked everytime the cgi script is accessed? <<

Yes- that is true because the CGI script - as you see - always starts the commander!

Depending on what you want to do it could be a solution to run commander periodically (automatically) - i.e. all 5 minutes - producing a site with html content that you can refer to for each chatter visiting your site. So the CGI script is not invoked each time a new visitor is coming along!
=================