## 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.

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