[ez77]

A bit off topic, please consider the following example in [1]:

  if ($args ~ post=140){
    rewrite ^ http://example.com/ permanent;
  }

Why is "^" used as a regex wildcard instead of ".*"? Thanks!

[1] http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpRewriteModule

[njs12345]

I think that regex matches any string as well - ^ simply matches the start of a line and all strings have a start.

It might also be more performant because the regex engine doesn't consume the whole string before finding a match..

[mnutt]

That is exactly right. See "Taxing Rewrites" on http://wiki.nginx.org/Pitfalls

[tedjdziuba]

In Soviet Russia, regex starts you.