mod_rewrite makes error logs fill up - apache

Question

I am using apache's mod rewrite to make "pretty urls", here is an example of a rule:
RewriteRule ^articles/(.+?)\.([0-9]+)/page\=([0-9]+)?$ /index.php?module=articles_full&aid=$2&title=$1&page=$3 [N,NC,QSA]
Problem is my error log fills up with stuff like this:
[Fri Feb 01 20:36:11 2013] [error] [client 94.246.88.189] File does not exist: /home/gamingon/public_html/articles
[Fri Feb 01 20:35:55 2013] [error] [client 66.249.73.195] File does not exist: /home/gamingon/public_html/articles
[Fri Feb 01 20:34:39 2013] [error] [client 66.249.73.195] File does not exist: /home/gamingon/public_html/articles
What would be the best way to stop the errors? It seems to work okay though but still i don't think the error logs are supposed to fill with that?

Answer 1

Add a RewriteCond that will make the RewriteRule kick in only when the file doesn't exist:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^articles/(.+?)\.([0-9]+)/page\=([0-9]+)?$ /index.php?module=articles_full&aid=$2&title=$1&page=$3 [N,NC,QSA]
Edit:
Looking at your rewrite rule again, it's a very specific regex that will only match when the uri is in the format
The text "articles"
one or more of any character
a dot
one or more digits
the text "/pages="
one or more digits
So, it will match on a URL like:
http://example.com/articles/awesome-article.3/page=2
but not on a URL like:
http://example.com/articles/awesome-article/page=2.
If you're seeing 404s, it's likely people are trying to visit URLs of the second form. Could be that your site has some links that are not being created correctly, check the logs to see if you can find any referers to help track down the problem.
I tested your rule and it works fine for me when I give it a correctly formatted URL.