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.
