http status code 404 - Mod Rewrites won't go to "404 page not found" for non existing pages

Question

I have the following code which works great:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/?$ index.php?mode=$1 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/?$ index.php?mode=$1&productContent=$2 [QSA]

My problem is when I go to a page that doesn't exist on my site ie. mysite.com/books I get the following warning error: failed to open stream: No such file or directory. Is there a way to avoid this error and have it go to "404 Page Not Found" instead?

Answer 1

You can't handle that with Apache's mod_rewrite, it's a script error and has to be taken care of by the code, php in your case.