What are wild characters? |
WILDCARDS : A wildcard is a character that can represent one or more characters in a file name. If you want to carry out a task for a group of files whose names have some thing common, you need not use the same command repeatedly for each file name in the group. Wildcards can be used to specify groups of files. Two wildcards are used in MS-DOS. They are `*’ (asterisk) and `?’ (question mark). The `*’ represents one or more characters that a group of files has in common whereas the `?’represents a single character that a group of files has in common. Eg. *.txt - represents all files having a “.txt” extension. letter.*- all files named “letter” with any extension R*.* - all files beginning with letter ‘R’ regardless of their extension ????.* - all files having four-letter names with any or no extension. If `*’ is used, when you specify a file name, MS-DOS ignores letters that come after the `*’ up to the dot (.). Eg. *m.exe would have the same result as *.exe has. Similarly, if the `*’ is used in the extension, DOS ignores the letters that apper afterward. Eg. Letter.*xt would have the same result as letter.*. |
