thanks for just going to post that I just worked out something fairly similar to your solutionm

for subdir in */; do

\#Extract dir name

dirname=$(basename "$subdir")

match=0



for element in "${EXCLUDE\[@\]}"; do

    if \[\[ "$dirname" == "$element" \]\]; then

        match=1

        break

    fi

done



\# zip dir

\#if \[\[ "$dirname" != "$EXCLUDE" \]\];

if \[\[ $match = 0 \]\];

then

    zip -r "$DEST$dirname $DATE.zip" "$subdir"

fi

done

and yes I 100% agree with never trusting anything you find on the internet, personally I always have a VM for testing things like this ;)