Wildcard character

In software, a wildcard character is a single character, such as an asterisk (*), used to represent a number of characters or an empty string. It is often used in file searches so the full name need not be typed.

In telecommunications, a wildcard is a character that may be substituted for any of a defined subset of all possible characters.

In computer (software) technology, a wildcard is a symbol used to replace or represent one or more characters.

When specifying file names (or paths) in CP/M, DOS, Microsoft Windows, and Unix-like operating systems, the asterisk character (*, also called "star") matches zero or more characters. For example, doc* matches doc and document but not dodo.

In Unix-like and DOS operating systems, the question mark ? matches exactly one character. In DOS, if the question mark is placed at the end of the word, it will also match missing (zero) trailing characters; for example, the pattern 123? will match 123 and 1234, but not 12345.

In Unix shells and Windows PowerShell, ranges of characters enclosed in square brackets ([ and ]) match a single character within the set; for example, [A-Za-z] matches any single uppercase or lowercase letter. In Unix shells, a leading exclamation mark ! negates the set and matches only a character not within the list. In shells that interpret ! as a history substitution, a leading caret ^ can be used instead.

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