Putting "disallow: /" with listing subdirectories?

Would the first line would override the rest?

[pocket723]

Sometimes I see sites with the following robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /user/

Does the line "Disallow: /" override the rest and block crawlers from accessing the entire site? Or does listing specific subdirectories override the top line and enable crawlers to access the rest of the site?

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], pocket723!

the disallow syntax of the robots exclusion protocol matches left-to-right.
in your example the 2nd and 3rd disallow are redundant and it is disallowing everything - including, in and under the root directory.

the default is to allow everything or if you want to whitelist a specific bot and disallow all others from those two directories:
User-agent: specific-bot
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /user/