Wildcard

Symbol used to replace or represent one or more characters. Wildcards or wild characters are either an asterisk (*), which represents one or more characters or question mark (?), which represents a single character. In the below examples of how a wildcard may be used, realize that wildcards are relatively universal. This means an example in DOS is similar to how it would be used in Linux, with the exception being that the command may be different.

DOS and Windows command line users

Listing files in MS-DOS that contain c, mp and any other character in-between. For example, comp, camp, c2mp, and c-mp would all be matched.

dir c?mp

In this next example the dir command would only list files that end with .MP3 file extension.

dir *.mp3

List any file that ends with data. For example, appdata, mydata, and 123data would all be matched.

dir *data

List any file that is four characters long, begins with he, and has any extension. For example, help.txt, help.mp3, and heck.jpg would all be matched.

dir he??.*

Rename all files in the current directory that end with the file extension .txt to .jpg. For example, the file test.txt would become test.jpg.

rename *.txt *.jpg

Deleting files in MS-DOS that begin with comp and end with a .txt extension.

del comp*.txt

Linux and Unix

Listing files in a Linux variant or Unix variant that begin with comp.

ls comp*

Deleting files in a Linux or Unix variant that contain c, mp and any character in-between.

rm c?mp

Microsoft Excel

Excel formula to search for any character using the * wildcard in cells B1 through B6 and if found perform use SUM to add all values between A1 and A6.

=SUMIF(A1:A6,"*",B1:B6)

Also see: Asterisk, Glob, Meta-character, Regex