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 regularexpressions, '.' matches any one character and "[...]"

matches any one of the enclosed characters.

See also Backus-Naur Form.

(1997-07-16)