[vox-tech] moving an url gracefully

[Peter Jay Salzman]

i have a directory on my webserver that contains some fairly popular pages.

i'd like to change the url from

   http://www.dirac.org/foo/bar

to

   http://www.dirac.org/bar

is there a graceful way to do this and have the info updated by the search
engines?  i hear that google puts higher rankings on urls that are around
for a long time.  anyway of avoiding that reduction in rank?

pete