Apache .htaccess acting strangely? - .htaccess

Question

My .htaccess file looks like this:
#Options FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*)$
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9\-\/]*[a-zA-Z0-9])$ index.php?_path=$1&%1
Here is my file structure:
example.com/
|- rewriteTest/
| |- images/
| | |- logo.png
| | |- icon.png
| |- style/
| | |- housekeeping.css
| | |- style.css
| |- .htaccess
| |- index.php
The desired behavior is that
example.com/rewriteTest/any/path
should point to
example.com/rewriteTest/index.php?_path=any/path
AND
example.com/rewriteTest/images
(without the leading slash) should point to
example.com/rewriteTest/index.php?_path=images
AND
example.com/rewriteTest/images/logo.png
should point to
example.com/rewriteTest/index.php?_path=images/logo.png
The rewriting works if the path is not an existing directory or file. However, if, say, I navigate to the /images directory, the url in my browser (Chrome) changes to /images/?_path=images and shows a 403 page. And if I navigate to /images/logo.png, the image opens up, instead of showing the page at /index.php?_path=images/logo.png.
Why is this happening and how do I fix this?

Answer 1

Your regex seems to be an issue. Try this:
DirectoryIndex index.php
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /rewriteTest/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L,NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !(^|&)_path=[^&]+ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php?_path=$1 [L,QSA]
Also to open a directory URL use a trailing slash like http://domain.com/images/