Hey Guys I sorta of have an Idea on where to start but I fear this is going to get complicated on me quick.

I have a list of directories that I delete files from all the time but now there has come a need to exclude some of those directories and keep the files in there for a bit longer.

In my script I need to be able to list those directories and output the list to a file, then read from that file and exclude the dirs that I need to keep files in. Can anyone give me a hint as to where to start with this. I already have a script written to delete files from all of these directories just not sure how to handle the exceptions I guess,

Thanks a ton,
Michael

What does your script look like? If you post some of that, it would be possible to modify it for you. Or offer you advice on what to change.

if it's shell scripting:

two ways I will present onto thee, the number of the ways being two:

the first way, of the two ways being this: that thou commenteth out thy lines like so:

grep -v "^#"

The second way you can also see, and is not as efficient, but sometimes schoolteachers like things a bit complicated:

make a file of directories to ignore:
in your loop for the directories, you can grep the directory-to-be-cleared in the ignore file (send stdout and stderr to /dev/null); use the return value of grep (checkout man grep) to determine whether or not the directory is in the ignore-list; if it isn't: clear it out, else keep it dirty.

the rest I leave to you, as I have a sinking feeling some school told people to look here for help