CliffMitchell wrote:With OS X when I browse http://localhost it works and takes me to the XAMPP for Mac OS X home page as you would expect - good, everything still works!
When I run my test file http://localhost/shawcottage/test.php) the output is: Document_route=/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/htodcs so nothing has changed. At this point I checked the XAMPP control panel (from where I restarted apache) and I can see that apache is running but in the Application log is an error message:
Beware - this may come frome the browsers cache!! This is always an issue if you change Apache but do not clear the Browser Cache.
CliffMitchell wrote:So, my immediate problem is that I cannot change the DocumentRoot setting in httpd.conf. What am I doing wrong?
In my mind you simply did a typo, but I neither see your httpd.conf nor your filesystem. I am pretty sure that you misspelled anything or used a wrong syntax in httpd.conf
P.S.: Just saw the follow ups, of course it was a typo!