Question

RewriteRule ^[^/.]*$ new/$0

everytime i type mydomain.com/somepath/to/somewhere it throws 404

its supposed to translate to : mydomain.com/new/somepath/to/somewhere

Answer 1

Lets parse your rule really quickly:

Anchor at the start, matching anything that is not / or not any character, 0 or more times, anchor at the end.

In other words, it will never match anything, because . matches anything (and thus [^.] doesn’t match anything).

I think you meant:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/?new/
RewriteRule ^/?(.+)$ new/$1 [L]

This reads
Anchor at the start, matching 0 or 1 / , followed by 1 or more of any character (saving this match for later), anchor at the end.

(The RewriteCond prevents rewriting things in the /new/ directory, as per Devin Ceartas’s answer. The [L] prevents any further redirects)