Are there any problems with having multiple htaccess files?

[brizad]

A few of my sites have a cms (joomla), wordpress, and forums which all require htaccess mods (mainly rewrites). I've always just let the various install programs add the htaccess as they needed and never though about it.

So now I have an htaccess file in each of these folders
/
/forums
/blog

Is there any problem with having this many htaccess files instead of just one in /?

I've never run into any issues, but today I was adding a 301 rewrite (from www to non-www) and noticed it only worked in / but not the /blog or /forums. So I thought I'd add the 301 rules to the other folders too but then I got to wondering if this was the best way to do things.

I don't know how all of this looks to the search engines either (as far as SEO goes) and I don't want to be doing anything to screw up rankings.

Thanks for any advice!

[StupidScript]

It's not an issue for Apache, so long as there is only one .htaccess file in any directory ... that's what they're for. As far as search engines go, as long as they are allowed to spider those directories you shouldn't have a problem, .htaccess-wise.