Path to a directory should return 404

[Ruslan Ermilov]

On Mon, Nov 07, 2011 at 05:22:29PM -0500, nchainani wrote:
> Under the document root, I have few directories like
> <root>/1/file1.html
> <root>/1/file2.html
> <root>/2/file1.html
> <root>/2/file2.html
> 
> If I go to the url http://localhost:8080/1, I get back a 301 with the
> new location http://localhost/1/     autoindexing is off, and so I end
> up with a 403 Forbidden page.
> 
> Can I change this default behavior such that all the requests for the
> directories get the universal 404 page i.e. instead of a redirection, it
> should simply return the configured 404 page for location /.
> 
> Sorry, I couldn't find a similar post on the forums. Thanks for any
> pointers.

Something like that maybe?

: location / {
:     #error_page 404 ...;
:     location ~ /$ { return 404; }
: }