> "When AMANDA attempts to exclude a file or directory it does so relative to
> the area being archived. For example if /var is in your disklist and you
> want to exclude /var/log/somefile, then your exclude file would contain
> ./log/somefile"

I understand that rather as a warning not to use /var in the path

> I really just want to confirm whether or not I could have used the entries
> without ./ and what the difference between the different sets of entries
> would be.

I think it does not make any difference (except maybe for path
globing?), it will exclude any file ending with the suffix .ora, in
any subdirectory that you are backuping.

The exclude list is handed as-is to gnu-tar, so one way to make sure
it does what you want is to try it with gnu-tar manually.

Best regards,

Olivier