Hiding sub directory from a url string

[omega]

I have been trying for a few hours now to hide a sub-directory from a url string on a joomla site using .htaccess

every method i have found either has no effect or breaks the site.

i am aiming to change all links with component in them:

http://mysite.com/component/music/7335

to

http://mysite.com/music/7335

I am using the latest Joomla 2.5 install but not sure how or if that affects anything.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

[tgr0ss]

This is taken from: http://www.digitalbuz.com/2009/10/21/hide-joomla-subdirectory-in-url/

If you have a website in a sub directory and want to point your main URL to it, here's a trick that worked for us.

We had a Joomla site installed in a sub-directory called "home".  This was sitting next to another directory called "dev".  The idea was to have 2 copies of the same website sitting next to each other:  a "development" site for testing, and a "live" production site.

Scanning the web, we found many people offered the following solution, which involves creating a file called ".htaccess" with the following code:

RewriteBase /

# Add trailing slash if path does not contain a period or end with a slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(\.|/$)
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.com/$1/ [R=301,L]

#Change http://yoursite.com to http://www.yoursite.com (Optional)
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com$
RewriteRule ^/?(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
#Rewrites http://www.yoursite.com/subdir to http://www.yoursite.com/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/subdir
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ subdir/$1 [L]

hopefully that gives you what you need

[omega]

thnks tgr0ss but i am not attempting to point my main url to a sub-directory.  i have already seen the above method and it is not a solution for my problem.  i have over 100 thousand links with the url string component/music/etc in it and would simply like to hide the word component.

[David_ODonnell]

I think URL rewriting is the answer.

You don't want the exact example tgr0ss gave, but you should be able to use it to produce URLs that point to, yet hide the /component/ directory.

[omega]

i'm afraid in my situation the fix tgr0ss offers just gives me a 500 error.