g1smd - 12:42 am on Nov 25, 2008 (gmt 0)

The final code above should work, and the order looks to be correct, but I do think the [NC] should be deleted. That will then allow it to redirect for all hosts that are not exactly www.example.com all in lower case, i.e. it will then be able to redirect for upper case WWW.EXAMPLE.COM hostname.

There's a slightly more efficient way of redirecting for named index files (as in the first block of code). The new code also caters for appended port numbers, query strings, and some extraneous included unwanted trailing punctuation. Check recent posts in the Apache forum for details.

It would be a good idea to upgrade that first block of code, because as it stands now the above example will issue a double redirect for any URL request that includes both an index filename and any sort of query string data. The index redirect won't be invoked until the next listed query-string redirect has stripped the query string off. Chains should be avoided.