RedirectMatch (Apache: The Definitive Guide)

8.7. RedirectMatch

RedirectMatch regex url
Server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess

Again, RedirectMatch works like Redirect, except that it takes a regular expression as the first argument.

In the Butterthlies business, sad to relate, the salespeople have been abusing their powers and perquisites, and it has been decided to teach them a lesson by hiding their beloved secrets file and sending them to the ordinary customers' site when they try to access it. How humiliating! Easily done, though.

Edit httpd.conf :

...
<VirtualHost sales.butterthlies.com>
ServerAdmin sales_mgr@butterthlies.com
Redirect /secrets http://www.butterthlies.com
DocumentRoot /usr/www/site.alias/htdocs/salesmen
...

The exact placing of the Redirect doesn't matter, as long as it is somewhere in the <VirtualHost> section. If you now access http://sales.butterthlies.com/secrets, you are shunted straight to the customers' index at http://www.butterthlies.com/.

An important difference between Alias and Redirect is that the browser becomes aware of the new location in a Redirect, but does not in an Alias, and this new location will be used as the basis for relative hot links found in the retrieved HTML.