When there's an error from a CGI script, Apache returns the HTTP 500 status code and serves up that page as the content of the response (at least by default). Apache has no way of knowing what the error actually was, though, so they serve a mostly-generic message.
You can see that it's happening in response to just a normal page request, and so obviously nothing you did caused it (... well, except requesting the page :-P), but the server doesn't know that. It just knows there's some kind of error.
It's the same kind of error returned by some CGIs when they detect invalid input (although most of them, at least the ones I've seen written in Perl/PHP, will actually write out some kind of response themselves, instead of making the web server give a 500). But that's why the message says "and anything you may have done"; in some cases, that page is served in response to something specific that the user did (other than just request the page). |
