How to zip files with exclude list in linux/unix

Instead of creating exclude.lst file, I'm assigning all the exclude files to a variable and passing those to the -x option in the zip.

For example

do_not_archive=/home/logs/apache/access.log /home/logs/tomcat/catalina.out

Then use zip as shown below

zip archives.2012.zip /home/logs/ -x $do_not_archive