I have the following RewriteRule in my .htaccess to redirect from a friendly url to my main application file: RewriteRule ^\/(.*).html$ home/www/page.php?p=$1 [L] This should send any url that points to a html page to page.php with the url as a parameter that will be parsed by the app. This works for urls that look like http://www.example.com/hello.html The problem is that I get a 404 error when the url contains a directory path, for example: http://www.example.com/category/hello.html The error reads: "File does not exist: /home/www/category" Seems it is first looking for the 'category' path instead of processing the .htaccess Any ideas how to solve this?