Blocking directories in robots.txt with Apache

[Dani]

We have the valid URLs:

www.daniweb.com/foo
www.daniweb.com/foo/
www.daniweb.com/foo/1
www.daniweb.com/foo/2
www.daniweb.com/foo/3

If I want to disallow them all in robots.txt, are both of these valid and will they do the same thing?

Disallow: /foo
Disallow: /foo/

Will the latter also block the URL www.daniweb.com/foo or will that be interpreted as a page underneath the root directory, and not within the foo directory? Contrastly, will the former be interpreted as only blocking the single page and not the foo directory?

[CimmerianX]

Using "Disallow: /foo/" would block the foo directory and everything in it.

Technically, without the trailing slash, Disallow blocks the 1 item, such as a single file. I would assume this would indicate a disallow on a single file named foo not the directory /foo/.

You can also use "Disallow: /foo*/" to block any subdirectory that began with "foo".

BTW, google has some webmaster tools available that will test the robots.txt file and report on the results. http://www.google.com/webmasters/