I am working on a shell script to run a tape backup for one of my servers and I have a small problem. Since I am using cpio, I first generate list of all files on the server with the find command. Then I want to go back and remove any directories that meet a certain pattern (like ' ^ \ /proc \ / ' ) that is included in another 'exclude' file. I thought of one way to do that using 'grep -v .... > somefile.txt' My problem is, how do I read in the list of excluded directories from a file and pass that to grep? I guess I don't understand redirection and shell programming enough to solve my problem. I could figure out a solution with Perl, but I must write te code in a bash script. This is what I have now, but it doesn't work... grep -v file.txt < cat exclude_list.txt > new_shorter_file.txt If anyone could help me out I would appreciate it! Thank-you, Mike Glaser --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: tclug-list-unsubscribe at mn-linux.org For additional commands, e-mail: tclug-list-help at mn-linux.org