Means of traversing a directory

[Gerard Samuel]

For a shell script.
The scenario.
Im running tar(1) to make a tar ball of a directory using the 
--newer-mtime to only get newer files after a specified date.
Unfortunately, it also creates unwanted "empty" directories.
Is there a way to scan the directory (recursively) into an array, and loop 
over it, in a script?

Thanks