.htaccess redirect to 404 page RewriteRule

Question

Is there a way to enter a RewriteRule in the htaccess file to redirect to a 404 page if a certain folder/url path as been typed or reached?

For example, if I want every user to be redirected to a 404 page if they get to: www.mydomain.com/abc or www.mydomain.com/abc/ or whatever that comes after "abc", even if that folder really exists, I do not want the users to be able to reach it. If they do reach it, I want them to see the 404 error page. * Please note I am not looking to set up a custom 404 error page, I am looking for a way to redirect to the default 404 page.

How can I do it? Is it possible?

RewriteRule ^abc/(*)?$ [R=404,L] 

And how can I do the same thing in php, redirect to a 404 error page? Once again I am not talking about setting a custom 404 page, I am talking about the default 404 page, to simply redirect a user to the 404 error page using php.

Answer 1

Instead of using mod_rewrite, you can do this with a RedirectMatch directive:

RedirectMatch 404 ^/abc/.*$ 

Answer 2

I did this on my website:

RewriteRule ^404/?$ 404.php ErrorDocument 404 http://www.example.com/404/ 

And on the root of my website I placed a 404.php page to customize that page.