How do you redirect pages from a directory to a subdirectory?

I had recently moved all the content on my website from being in the www.mysite.com/shop directory to being in the root directory. This means that I needed to redirect any request to visit a page with the /shop directory back to the same page in the root directory eg.

www.mysite.com/shop/categories/washroom

to

www.mysite.com/categories/washroom

This needed to happen with all pages in my site that were previously using the /shop directory.

I was given a solution on here which was:

RedirectMatch (^/shop/)(.*) http://www.mysite.com/$2

and it works perfectly however now I have had to switch back to using our old version of our software which is located at the /shop directory so I need the complete opposite redirect now eg.

www.mysite.com/categories/washroom

to

www.mysite.com/shop/categories/washroom

Can anyone help me please?

From serverfault

• RedirectMatch (^/categories/washroom/)(.*) http://www.mysite.com/shop/categories/washroom/$1

  does that work?

  : I just tried and it didn't work unfortunately.

  okonomiyaki : sorry replace the $1 with a $2

  : Thanks for your reply, I just checked it again and it still doesn't work. I need to redirect all of our pages to the same page in the /shop directory so i'm not sure that having a line of code for each page will work because there are a large number of pages to be redirected.

  okonomiyaki : Hmmm.. it works for me. I go to: http://x.x.x.x/categories/washroom and i get redirected to: http://x.x.x.x/shop/categories/washroom Even works when i put in: http://x.x.x.x/categories/washroom/blah.html redirects me to: http://x.x.x.x/shop/categories/washroom/blah.html

  : I still didn't get it to work with the categories pages yet however it is working now for the products pages using this code: RedirectMatch (^/products/)(.*) http://www.mysite.com/shop/products/$2 So, http://www.mysite.com/products/product1.html redirects to http://www.mysite.com/shop/products/product1.html Which solves the majority of my problem because until our site gets upgraded and is working properly we need visitors that are coming from search engines to go to the correct place. Thanks for your persistance with helping me fix this.
  From okonomiyaki

• Reverse your logic:

  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/shop
  RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://%{SERVER_NAME}/shop/$1 [L,R]
  

  : Thanks for your reply, I have solved my original problem with the answer above however your reply will be useful for future reference.
  From troyengel