Miscellaneous File Extensions

Certain characters on your keyboard can be used in DOS as "wildcard" characters, in place of file names or extenstions.

The asterisk (*) represents any 0 or more characters of a file name.
The question mark (?) represents 0 or one character.

Practically speaking, this means that the user has a simple way to specify a set of file names that have some characteristics in common.

For Example:

• history. * - will match any file named "history", with any extension
• *.doc- will match all documents with .doc extension
• *.* - will match all files of any name and any extension

These characters are useful when copying, moving or deleting a large group of files. It allows the user to quickly search through many files of the same name or extension, and execute a search more thoroughly.