Question on Bourne shell script.

["Mike Glaser" <mikeg@tcamerican.com>]

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