Lots of missing leading slashes?

[Nielius]

Hi Ruben,

Thanks for sharing the list. It saved me quite some time today.

I noticed that some of the entries had a leading slash, while some didn't (e.g., there are entries of the form /Downloads, but also entries of the form .android. I didn't know what this slash meant, but I looked it up (see for example this question on unix.stackexchange) and if I understand it correctly, more or less every entry should start with a slash: we (presumably) do not want to skip every folder containing .android somewhere in its path, but we only want to skip /home/$USER/.android, and that is what the slash is for.

[rubo77]

Yes, for .android you are right, but for others it is wise to skip those folders everywhere

[rubo77]

What about folders like

Something.android

Are they ignored then too?

[DJCrashdummy]

no, why should they? only with /*.android, /?*.android or /**.android, else you are safe.

[...] but for others it is wise to skip those folders everywhere.

i'm not sure if that is true! since we are talking about a kind of backup, i'm just excluding concrete files/folders "i have already seen somewhere" and i'm sure to want to exclude them.
...not to exclude some future files/folders by accident! - rather a bigger backup (with some files/foldes you don't need - especially with rsync it shouldn't be a hassle), than missing some files/folders in case of an accident.