Patterns are implicitly anchored at the beginning and end of each string when testing for a match.
In June 2019, Rich Salz released the original version of the now-defunct library on GitHub under a public domain dedication.
wildmat is most commonly seen in NNTP implementations such as Salz's own INN, also in unrelated software such as GNU tar and Transmission.
GNU tar replaced wildmat with the POSIX fnmatch glob matcher in September 1992.
A simplified version of wildmat oriented toward UTF-8 encoding has been developed by the IETF NNTP working group.