htaccess <Directory> deny from all

I've been cleaning up my project lately. I have a main .htaccess in the root directory and 6 others. 5 of them ran Options -Indexes which i didn't see anypoint of allowing any Directory viewing so moved that to the main one. so now i only have 2 .htaccess files. the main and one in /system which holds

# Block External Access
deny from all

So i wanted to run that on /system only from within the main. So i deleted the one in /system and added

 # Block External Access
<Directory "/system/">
deny from all
</Directory>

to my main .htaccess file leaving 1!

but now i get a

> Internal Server Error > > The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was > unable to complete your request. > > Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@localhost and > inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might > have done that may have caused the error. > > More information about this error may be available in the server error > log. > > Apache/2.2.17 (Ubuntu) Server at 10.0.1.5 Port 80

The goal is to block reading any files in /system and it's sub directory's but allow viewing of everything else all from one .htaccess file for the whole project. Any ideas on how i can fix this? I did some Google searches but couldn't really come out with anything.

You cannot use the Directory directive in .htaccess. However if you create a .htaccess file in the /system directory and place the following in it, you will get the same result

#place this in /system/.htaccess as you had before
deny from all

You can also use RedirectMatch directive to deny access to a folder.

To deny access to a folder, you can use the following RedirectMatch in htaccess :

 RedirectMatch 403 ^/folder/?$

This will forbid an external access to /folder/ eg : http://example.com/folder/ will return a 403 forbidden error.

To deny access to everything inside the folder, You can use this :

RedirectMatch 403 ^/folder/.*$

This will block access to the entire folder eg : http://example.com/folder/anyURI will return a 403 error response to client.

You can use from root directory:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(?:system)\b.* /403.html

Or:

RewriteRule ^(?:system)\b.* /403.php # with header('HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden');