Just following up on this because I got a very useful reply from Holger which 
explained that a variable can be used to hold a list of excludes, but noted 
that doing so will break the ability to use the GUI. If the GUI is used to edit 
a host's config after manually setting a variable all changes will be 
overwritten.

>>From Holger:

You simply create a variable in the host (or even global) config file ...

        my @common_excludes = ('*access_log*', 
'.apdisk', '.cache');

and then reference that multiple times:

        $Conf {BackupFilesExclude} = {
                '/home' => [ 
@common_excludes ],
                '/var'  => [ 
@common_excludes, '/lib/mysql' ],
                '/usr'  => [ 
@common_excludes ],
                '/boot' => [ 
@common_excludes ],
                '/data' => [ 
@common_excludes ],
        };

or

        $Conf {BackupFilesExclude} = {
                '/var'    
 => [ @common_excludes, '/lib/mysql' ],
                '/example' => [ 
],             # no excludes here
                '*'      
  => [ @common_excludes ],
        };


Thanks Holger for your help! I've implemented it and it saves me much messiness 
in my config files.  8)

+----------------------------------------------------------------------
|This was sent by itismike AT gmail DOT com via Backup Central.
|Forward SPAM to abuse AT backupcentral DOT com.
+----------------------------------------------------------------------



------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
BackupPC-users mailing list
BackupPC-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
List:    https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users
Wiki:    http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net
Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/