title: How can I minimize my Splunk search function if all of the host names begin with the same letters?
body: <p>I have a number of hosts (servers) and I want to search through all of them except for 4 different ones.</p>
  
  <p>Here is what I have working at the moment to exclude the 4 servers:</p>
  
  <pre><code>(host!="ajl2dal8" OR host!="ajl2dal9" OR host!="ajl2atl8" OR host!="ajl2atl9")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>While this works fine, its fairly sizable and will only get longer if I need to exclude more. Since they all begin with ajl2 and have either atl or dal and a number, is there any way I could get something like this to work:</p>
  
  <pre><code>(host!="ajl2[atl|dal][1|2|3|4]")
  </code></pre>