I have an rewrite recursion error somewhere on my website that Google Bot caused, but I can't find the url that caused it because my Loglevel is low. I raised it but it has not happened again so far.
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]
All Rewriterules look fine to me and have the [L] flag, except this one.
I can't quite understand it. It is from the open source shop system Magento.
As far as I can tell it does nothing but sets the environment variable E. But isn't that a very stupid way of doing that? Shouldn't you use SetEnv if that was the goal?
This line is setting the environment variable to the value of user authentication string - essentially setting a variable rather than constant value. As far as I know, SetEnv and SetEnvIf only allow you to set an environment variable to a predetermined constant.
The variable being set is actually HTTP_AUTHORIZATION, not E. I would guess this is part of the user authentication process.