[users@httpd] .htaccess and case-insensitive regular expression matching

[John Walton]

Hi,

I'm trying to create a .htaccess file that will reside in an /images directory.  I want the .htaccess file to only deny access to everything EXCEPT image files (gif, jpg, bmp, png, etc).  I've searched the web, apache manual, and PCRE manual for hours but for the life of me I can't get the regular _expression_ to do a case-insensitive match with the FilesMatch directive.  The file I created below does this trick so long as the file extension is lower-case.  I tried changing the regular _expression_ below to "(?i)\.(gif|jpe?g|png|bmp)$" and "\.(?i:gif|jpe?g|png|bmp)$" but that causes an internal server error.  The web server is running Apache 1.3 on FreeBSD 4.7.

.htaccess file:
Deny from all
<FilesMatch "\.(gif|jpe?g|png|bmp)$">
  Allow from all
</FilesMatch>


Thanks for your help!
John