wild card
<operating system, programming, text> (From card games in which certain
cards, often the joker, can act as any other card) A special character or
character sequence which matches any character in a string comparison, like
ellipsis ("...") in ordinary written text.
In Unix filenames '?' matches any single character and '*' matches any zero or
more characters. In regular expressions, '.' matches any one character and
"[...]" matches any one of the enclosed characters.
See also Backus-Naur Form.
(1997-07-16)
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