> Try converting BOTH sections to <Directorymatch> (even thought the > second one will be a trivial regex). Then the order of processing > will be controlled by the order of listing in the config file. I tried that, in both orders, but without success. I checked that the DirectoryMatch for the cgi-bin/admin subdirectory was working by having it alone. Then I added a DirectoryMatch for "/var/www/cgi-bin/.*/" - this turned ON password prompting for the subdirectories of cgi-bin but it also overrode the "require user" statement for "/var/www/cgi-bin/admin". I tried both orders as well. Then I tinkered around a bit more, and stumbled on the solution: # Password protect subdirectories of cgi-* <Directory /var/www/cgi-*/*/*> Require valid-user </Directory> # Allow only Swifty into cgi-bin/admin <Directorymatch /var/www/cgi-(bin|test)/admin> Require user Swifty </Directorymatch> I'm wildcarding the cgi-bin directory, because I have two virtual hosts, one uses cgi-bin and the other uses cgi-test. The above configuration achieves my objectives, but I have no idea at all how <Directory /var/www/cgi-*/*/*> manages to turn on password prompting for subdirectories of cgi-bin. It is almost as though the "Directory" directive is matching the fully-qualified filename rather than the directory. It matches /var/www/cgi-bin/users/test - but the directory name is /var/www/cgi-bin/users - the "test" part is the filename of my test script. Oh, well. It's working. I can leave worrying about why for another day. Thank you for giving me the will to persist until I found an answer! Steve Swift http://www.swiftys.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------- The official User-To-User support forum of the Apache HTTP Server Project. See <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/userslist.html> for more info. To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx " from the digest: users-digest-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx