MS

• May 6th, 2007

 

A wildcard character is a character that can be substituted for any of a well-defined subset of all possible characters. It may also be termed as a pattern-matching character.

For example, while referring to Unix filenames, a * character within a filename can be substituted for any set of characters at that location including zero to multiple characters, whereas a ? character can be substituted for any exactly one character at that location.