Is it possible to exclude using a one liner?

[VasilisThePikachu]

I am trying to make a general purpose script that i can quickly template on my systems and take backups

I set it up so that I have a vars.sh file that sets environment variables and also contains the list of stuff to backup etc, as an example:

TO_BACKUP="/home /etc"
TO_IGNORE="/home/*/.cache /home/*/.npm /home/*/.local/share/steam"

borg create --compression auto,zstd,9 --exclude-caches --exclude "$TO_IGNORE" blabla::'Auto-Backup-{now}' $TO_BACKUP

TO_BACKUP works fine like this, however TO_IGNORE does not, I tried wrapping it in parentheses as seen above, but it did not do the trick

I see everywhere else for every directory people provide another --exclude which kind of messes up my way I want to do my script of only needing to modify one file.

Is it possible to somehow do what I need here? Provide it all the excludes via an environment variable?

[ThomasWaldmann]

Maybe rather give your backup sets different names and derive a filename for --patterns-from from that and put all your recursion roots, includes / excludes into that file.

[VasilisThePikachu]

Thanks for that suggestion, found out and used --exclude-from FILE instead

[VasilisThePikachu]

So I accidentally found out about --exclude-from FILE which works well enough for me

https://github.com/VasilisThePikachu/borg-backup-script-template/blob/de594c37d6ae213b2b90d859243b2bbc675b508d/backup.sh#L16