Magento URL issues
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I am still new to magento but I have been slowly making progress on replicating the production environment to a sandbox environment.

The issue I am currently running into is that when I go to my site I get a long url rather than a short optimized url.  I am guessing it is a configuration setting that I need to change as well as, I went through and had to add index.php to the url string for it to work properly.

What I want to be able to do is use a short url such as /category/page.html rather than catalog/category/view/s/power-tools/id/261/

Thank you in advance!