The only way to know would have been to have a look at the processes table
before killing everyone and restarting.
If you nginx through the package management of your distribution and
service scripts to manage nginx processus, there is little-to-no chance you
got multiplt nginx masters running. It is however possible to spawn
multiple nginx (master) instances if you manage you processes manually (and
is useful when you do an on-the-fly upgrade). No multiple instances can
bind to listen on the same ports though.

It would have been interesting to dig further, since you are saying the
configuration was valid (as after restart nginx accepted/loaded it).

In the current state, there is not much ability to conclude on anything.
Maybe could you try to reproduce the problem by recreating your old
configuration, loading it and trying to load the current configuraiton
again?
Remember to use `nginx -t` have a look at nginx' error logs on reload to
check the configuration has been accepted.
---
*B. R.*

On Sun, Apr 10, 2016 at 9:27 PM, Alexander Schwarz <alexschwarz@live.de>
wrote:

> Hello Francis,
>
> you are right. But the weird thing is, i already commented out that line
> (it was for caching/expires headers, and yes, missing the backslash).
>
> Is there any chance I was running two nginx instances? Because it seemed
> my configuration was kind of cached, as i commented that line, but it still
> didn't work. Now, after i completely reinstalled nginx everything is
> working fine.
>
> I got the idea because i downgraded from newest nginx version to a older
> one in my testing. Is it possible that there were multiple instances?
>
> Anyway, thank you very much.
>
>
>
> > Date: Sun, 10 Apr 2016 19:37:35 +0100
> > From: francis@daoine.org
> > To: nginx@nginx.org
> > Subject: Re: Error 404 if url contains "star"
> >
> > On Sun, Apr 10, 2016 at 07:16:33PM +0200, Alexander Schwarz wrote:
> >
> > Hi there,
> >
> > > i have a very strange problem with my nginx configuration. If the URL
> contains the word "star", i get the standard 404 Error not found page.
> > > I defined a rule that should redirect all requests to index.php.
> >
> > http://nginx.org/r/location
> >
> > Your rule does not redirect *all* requests.
> >
> > > Any ideas?!
> >
> > There's a missing backslash "\" on the "location ~*" line, just before
> > the ".(".
> >
> > f
> > --
> > Francis Daly francis@daoine.org
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > nginx mailing list
> > nginx@nginx.org
> > http://mailman.nginx.org/mailman/listinfo/nginx
>
> _______________________________________________
> nginx mailing list
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>
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