How to exclude directories from tar in this script?

Question

Answering my own question yesterday, I wrote a bash script which archives all directories within a defined directory into their own separate archive files. I have also defined a variable for a file which would include a list of directories I would like to skip. I wanted it to work something like the --exclude-from parameter for tar, but obviously that would not work. What is the best way I can accomplish this? I am thinking that grep would be the path I should take.

#!/bin/bash

#START
TIME=`date +%Y-%m-%d_%Hh%Mm`     # Append date and time to backup file
SRCDIR=/srv                      # Location of directories to backup
DESDIR=/srv/backup               # Destination of backup files
EXCLUDE=exclude.txt  # File which defines what to exclude from archiving

for dir in $SRCDIR/*/
do
  base=$(basename "$dir")
  tar -cpzf $DESDIR/$base-$TIME.tar.gz $dir
done
#END

Answer 1

You can use grep to check if the directory is listed in your exclude file, as shown in this answer on SO:

#!/bin/bash

#START
TIME=`date +%Y-%m-%d_%Hh%Mm`     # Append date and time to backup file
SRCDIR=/srv                      # Location of directories to backup
DESDIR=/srv/backup               # Destination of backup files
EXCLUDE=exclude.txt  # File which defines what to exclude from archiving

for dir in $SRCDIR/*/
do
  base=$(basename "$dir")
  if grep -Fxq "$base" $EXCLUDE
  then
    echo "$base excluded"
  else
    tar -cpzf $DESDIR/$base-$TIME.tar.gz $dir
  fi
done
#END