I am trying to move multiple old urls to a single new one on the same domain, but I have searched and tried different rules and they do not come out as wanted.
Oh, my, that’s a HUGE question. Before I get into that, though, I need a few questions answered:
Are you on an Apache server? What version (1.x or 2.x)?
Do you have Options +MultiViews (enabled)? Why? IMHO, it’s a horrible thing to do (embed the file to be served in the path, i.e., NOT as the file request at the end of the URI).
What do you expect to serve using “something” as your URI?
Without index.php in the URI, it would be the smart thing to do to use a mod_alias redirect statement (which should loop on the first example).
If you are wanting to make your redirect to “something” AND can actually serve a file, you can sort that out easily using my mod_rewrite tutorial (http://dk.co.nz/seo) with the hint that you make the specific redirections first then the general redirections.
Back to your MultiViews “problem.” It looks like you’re trying to redirect TO a new format (which cannot be directly served) so I’ll ask you to look at the “Redirect to NEW format” in my tutorial. Yes, it’s covered in the examples (as are virtually all every day problems).
Basically I have two old .php pages from a Joomla site. Both pages had a long url and were re-written with a plugin of some sort. The content is combined into one .php Wordpress page, again with a re-written url, this time using Wordpress native url functions.