disallow: /*

robot.txt newbie, please help

[emm0uk]

i'm new to robots and i would like a simple (if possible) way to prevent robots from indexing all of my site content apart from the contents of the root folder. I have sub directories that i do not want indexing, but would rather not put the name of the folders on a robots.txt, so i was wondering if i can use a wildcard.
eg:
user-agent: *
disallow:/ *
Would this allow my root folder to be indexed, but prevent sub-folder from being indexed?
Also, how can i hide the robots.txt from all apart from robots? Script examples would be much appreciated as i'm pretty new to web building. Thanks all.

[moltar]

Welcome to WW emm0uk!

That would not do the trick. You need to specify each folder individually to avoid spidering.

Why would you want to hide them from robots anyways? If one can find it through your site then there is no need to hide it. If nobody can find it, then spiders won't find it either.

check out Robots.txt Tutorial [searchengineworld.com].