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Wildcard Character

Webopedia Staff
Last Updated May 24, 2021 7:59 am

A special symbol that stands for one or more characters. Many operating systems and applications support wildcards for identifying files and directories. This enables you to select multiple files with a single specification. For example, in DOS and Windows, the asterisk(*) is a wild card that stands for any combination of letters. The file specification

m*

therefore, refers to all files that begin with m. Similarly, the specification

m*.doc

refers to all files that start with m and end with.doc.

Many word processors also support wild cards for performing textsearches.