Patronizing the exclude * option

[Maurice Volaski]

I need to get around the requirement of --exclude=* to have all the 
parent directories of the files and directories that are to be 
included. So given the file..

/startdirectory/subdirectory1/subdirectory2/filetobecopied

I need to include
/
/subdirectory1
/subdirectory1/subdirectory2

I could just include the entire directory structure , but 
alternatively just include the needed paths. So the question is how 
can I extract every parent directory of this path?

I tried writing a recursive routine that accepts /startdirectory as 
$1 and the pathname of filetobecopied as $2. Here is latest 
incarnation, which doesn't work right, of course.

#!/bin/sh

rootpath="$1"
subpath="$2"

if [ $rootpath -ef $subpath ]
then
  echo "end of recursion"
  echo $subpath
else
  echo $subpath
  SUBDIRECTORY=$(/usr/bin/dirname $subpath)
  echo $SUBDIRECTORY
  /root/scripts/subdirname $SUBDIRECTORY
fi
-- 

Maurice Volaski, mvolaski at aecom.yu.edu
Computing Support, Rose F. Kennedy Center
Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University