Any .htaccess gurus here?

what is the backend?? .NET , linux,???? Web server???

 

.htaccess is a username/password system based on flat files. It doesn't have a lot to do with trapping web server 404 errors - unless I'm not understanding your question.

Normally, if you want to trap 404 errors (i.e. web page not found), you would configure that in the httpd.conf file (assuming you are using apache). You can setup a redirect or however you want to configure it, so that the server directs the client to a specific page (e.g. a fancy little "page not found" page). Or you can just loop the server back to the home page if you want also.

Again, I'm not sure what .htaccess has to do with all that. .htaccess normally is used along side .htpasswd as a means to secure a section of a website so that users are prompted for a username/password. That's different than the server handling missing pages when requested by the client.

If what you are attempting to accomplish here is to have the server step in and serve up a page in order to avoid an error that is actually present in the relative links in a web page, then the correct method is to fix the error, not tweak the server to make things work with the error present. Not only does that induce more load on the server (and network), but it's just a kludgey method at best for addressing (or in this case, not addressing) the root of the issue.

If the error is present across a large number of web pages, then issue a command like this in Unix:

perl -pi -e 's/error string/fixed string/g' *.html

where *.html is the matching files that need attention. The above perl line will do a global "edit" using a search/replace on any matching files. Once the changes are in place, you won't need to trap 404 errors.

Ray