Wildcard character

In computer (software) technology, a wildcard is a symbol used to replace or represent zero or more characters.

In DOS, if the question mark is placed at the end of the word, it will also match missing (zero) trailing characters; for example, the pattern 123?

In Unix shells and Windows PowerShell, ranges of characters enclosed in square brackets ([ and ]) match a single character within the set; for example, [A-Za-z] matches any single uppercase or lowercase letter.

The operation of matching of wildcard patterns to multiple file or path names is referred to as globbing.

In regular expressions, the period (., also called "dot") is the wildcard pattern which matches any single character.