Hi JennyW
It sounds like you are looking for a web hosting account on a UNIX platform. Unfortunately you are not likely to find a good FREE web hosting solution which allows cgi scripting. Despite this free web hosters usually involve ugly advertising banners be placed on your pages and their reliability and means of maintaining your content are pretty pathetic. Most of them don't involve shell access, which you will need if you want any degree of control over your scripts. I would search for web hosting on the internet, you can get good packages for only $10 a month, which allow cgi, php, perl, sql, etc.

This is a good link to a beginners UNIX tutorial:
http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/

This is slightly more advanced:
http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/~patrick/LOCAL/teach/unix/

After this you'll know enough to play around in your filesystem.

Hope this helps.

Regards