apache multiviews, how to disable it

In case of Options either you have to use * or - sign with all or with none; i.e.

Options FollowSymLinks -MultiViews -Indexes

is wrong.

If you are using + or - sign, you have to use for all options i.e.

Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews -Indexes

In /etc/apache2/httpd.conf you should find the section starting <Directory "/Library/WebServer/Documents"> and remove MultiViews from the Options directive there. The same goes for any other paths if your content isn't in that directory.

As an aside, if you're able to edit the server's main config file you should never have to use .htaccess file. Doing so only slows down the server, makes tracing the configuration harder and makes any use of mod_rewrite a brain-rending disaster.

Considering this is OS X, one snag I ran into was my user specific declarations (in the users/username.conf subdirectory of apache2) had MultiViews turned on, overriding httpd.conf.

MultiViews was substituting /search.php for /search, messing up the "pretty" Codeigniter urls on my dev machine.