title: gzipping up a set of directories and creating a tar compressed file
body: <p>My bash fu is not what it should be.</p>
  
  <p>I want to create a little batch script which will copy a list of directories into a new zip file.</p>
  
  <p>There are (at least) two ways I can think of proving the list of files:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>read from a file (say config.txt). The file will contain the list of directories to zip up  OR</p></li>
  <li><p>hard code the list directly into the bash script</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>The first option seems more straightforward (though less elegant).</p>
  
  <p>The two problems I am facing are that I am not sure how to do the following:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>provide the list of directories to the shell script</li>
  <li>iterate over the list of directories</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Could someone suggest in a few lines, how I can do this?</p>
  
  <p>BTW, I am running on Ubuntu 10.0.4</p>