robots.txt problem and subdirs / wildcards

[disgust]

my site structure is like this

site.com/subsection/category/item

however there are LOTS of categories. over 7,000, to be precise. wildcards can't be used, correct?

ie I can't do

Disallow: /subsection/*/

I want a bot to be able to browse all of the categories, but none of the items.

how can I go about this? do I need to resort to meta tags? or use mod rewrite in a way to make it easier to deal with with robots.txt?

[goodroi]

wildcards will work with googlebot. unfortunately google is more of the exception and not the normal way bots behave. to make your site suitable to all engines you are better using metatags or htaccess. good luck :)