How do I disallow an entire directory with robots.txt?

Question

I have two sites I am currently working on which is a shopping cart and another shopper...Both are under the same domain name so for example

http://someurl.com/first_url 
http://someurl.com/second_url 

Both these urls have tons of pages below them

http://someurl.com/first_url/product1
http://someurl.com/first_url/product2 
http://someurl.com/first_url/product3

http://someurl.com/second_url/product1
http://someurl.com/second_url/product2 
http://someurl.com/second_url/product3

How do I disallow the main url /first_url and /second_url to and all the subpages and sub directories ...I was thinking something like this but I don't know if this works or not and whether it was the correct syntax

Disallow: /first_url/*/
Disallow: /second_url/*/

Answer 1

You don't need the trailing slash to block those directories. This will work:

Disallow: /first_url/*
Disallow: /second_url/*

This Google help page covers this quite well.