htaccess concern

what is the meaning of this line RewriteRule /*$

[steven mheakyle]

I saw this in my htaccess what is the meaning of this RewriteRule /*$ [yahoo.com...] [L,R]

what exactly this line do, if i remove this will it harm my website.

thanks

[MattyUK]

As far as I understand it it means:
If / (slash) occurs zero or more times before the end of the url then redirect to [yahoo.com...] and stop processing more rewrite rules.

Since * is a greedy match (i.e. zero or more times) it would probably trigger most if not all the time. So it looks like some friendly fellow has set up a sitewide redirect to yahoo.com.

Does your site work with it in?
Is your site hosted by yahoo.com? Perhaps it is part of a bigger solution from them.

You can always comment out the rule rather than remove it completely. Do this with a # at the start of the line.

#RewriteRule /*$ [yahoo.com...] [L,R]

This would disable that rule without removing it. If everything breaks you can remove the # and go back to how you are now.

Matt

[edited by: MattyUK at 6:37 pm (utc) on Nov. 28, 2006]