HTTP 301 Redirect Question

[Robert Sullivan]

I have previously used pages with meta refresh tags when I needed to
redirect visitors, but impending major changes to our site caused me to
look at doing it the "real" way.  Our site is hosted on a Unix server
running Apache.

I have most of what I need to do working, and I can redirect from a
discontinued directory to an error page:

Redirect 301 /directoryname/
http://www.scpl.org/deadpage.html

What does not work is the case where directoryname has subdirectories;
the subdirectory (e.g., level 2) name gets appended to the end of the
error page:  http://www.scpl.org/deadpage.htmllevel2

I spent 45 minutes on the phone with the ISP's owner while he tried
various combinations of regular expressions in my .htaccess file.  There
is probably something simple that we're both missing.  Any advice would
be appreciated.

Bob Sullivan  <rsullivan at sals.edu>
Schenectady County Public Library (NY)  <http://www.scpl.org/>
Schenectady Digital History Archive
<http://www.schenectadyhistory.org/>