Compare contents of a dir with golden text file

[lodey]

Hi there,
I have been given the task of looking after certian directories on a drive, making sure that the only files contained within them are the ones that we need. I wrote a excel macro to compare the files but this means that i have to go to the tool, extract the contents to a text file, map to the network drive, copy the text file and then import that into excel which is time consuming . I was wondering if anyone could give me a push in the right direction to compile this into a vb program as i do not want to use the excel approach for mch longer. I can write a procedure that checks that specfic files exist but the data is coded into the program and the contents of the dir can be changed depending on what new revisions appear...so what i need to do is have a text file listing the golden contents that should be on the drive being used as the input.
To extract the contents of the dir i use the following dos commands:
dir *.* >> a:\<filename>.txt

Also how would i go about flagging the differences to a message box...

thanks in advance

[gupex]

a push in the right direction

more of a 'nudge' really, but (not knowing your VB skills) check out 'Dir' in VB, and let us know if you need more.