lucy24 - 1:03 am on Jan 23, 2013 (gmt 0)

Overlapping last two (at least!) posts:

I changed the second rewrite rule to have $ at the end of the pattern. With this, there seems to be no effective rewriting or redirection at all.

In the pattern, $ is an anchor. It means that the text you're looking at must be the very last thing in the URL-- not counting query, if any.

Did you ever decide whether your URLs should or should not end in a slash? Since it isn't a "real" directory, you have to enforce a format; mod_dir won't do it for you. Or, uhm, am I thinking of another thread? There were two fairly similar questions side by side...

If your URL ends in a slash and the rewrite/redirect pattern doesn't, then the rule will only work if you leave off the anchor.

192.168.1.205 - - [21/Jan/2013:12:38:44 --0600] [192.168.1.106/sid#698560][rid#73ca98/initial] (1) [perdir F:/Websites/RepHunter/current/] pass through F:/Websites/RepHunter/current/manufacturers-sales-reps-register.php

192.168.1.205 - - [21/Jan/2013:12:38:44 --0600] [192.168.1.106/sid#698560][rid#73f400/initial/redir#1] (1) [perdir F:/Websites/RepHunter/current/] pass through F:/Websites/RepHunter/current/error404.php
Ouch. This is a logging level I don't read fluently, but this is the core of the problem, right? At this point your server is looking for a physical file called

current/manufacturers-sales-reps-register.php

which of course doesn't exist, because the newly redirected request is now supposed to get rewritten.

With opening anchors you can always cheat by leaving off both the ^ and the leading / and then you don't have to remember whether the / is supposed to be there or not. Then, once you've got everything else working, add the slash-plus-anchor combination so the rule will run faster in real life. Opening anchor means mod_rewrite may only have to look at one or two characters to see if the rule fails. Otherwise it has to read the whole thing.