301 Issues

Need help setting up Wildcard 301s

[BrooklynB]

I have 2 situations requiring wildcard 301s. Since I am not a programmer, I’m a bit scared to implement them. Perhaps somebody can tell me if it is straightforward and what the code for .htaccess would be.

These are the situations:
1)My programmers have updated a database that was living at [subdomain.example.com...] to now live at http://www.example.com/browse.cgi/name_of_search_category.html Google has completely indexed that old database and is serving very good organic results from it. I have not yet taken it down. Google has also indexed the new update. My question is how to create a wildcard 301 so that any link from Google to [subdomain.example.com...] will go to the home page of the new database once the old database is taken down. Hope I’ve made that clear
2)Presentations at Pubcon made me take a look at how my site is indexed by Google. To my horror, Google has indexed 3800 pages of http://www.example.com and 2300 pages of http://example.com. From other posts here it seems I need a 301 to standardize my domain as http://www.example.com.