.htaccess 301 redirect path and all child-paths

Question

I want accesses to e.g. www.thisdomain.com/docs/path1/path2 to redirect to www.thatdomain.com/path1/path2

(Note that docs is not a part of the new path)

I ha

Answer 1

According to section "Redirect Old domain to New domain using htaccess redirect" of the first Google result which I found searching for "htaccess redirect" (without the double quotes), this piece of code will suffice:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

According to their description of the technique, it will redirect the directory the .htaccess file is placed in recursively (including any child paths), just as you intend. Of course, mod_rewrite needs to be present for the rewrite directives to work.

Answer 2

With regular expressions, * means any number of the previous atom, which will match /docs and /docs/. Try this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^docs$ http://www.domain.com/ [R=301,L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^docs/(.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L,QSA]

(QSA is query string append, so /docs/foo?bar=baz won't lose the ?bar=baz.)