Wildcards

When you conduct a search, you can do a wildcard. A wildcard is a character that can be used as a substitute for an character in a search. This enables a better chance of finding a file that you are looking for.

There is a couple different wildcards

The star wildcard *
The question mark ?
Square brackets [ ]

The star wildcard *

This is used to find any number or character capitalized or not capitalized. It will also find everything and not be specific.

If you do a search for dog.*

You will get (if it is on the computer) dog.jpg, dog.gif, dog.txt and anything else with word dog in it.

If you do a search for *.jpg

you will get any file on your computer that ends with .jpg. such as Fred.jpg, list.jpg, flower.jpg. This can be a huge list and can take time to complete because it will list every file found with the .jpg extension.

The question mark ?

This is used to find an individual character or number

If you type do?.jpg it will search only for items that are do?.jpg. Another words it will find dog.jpg or dot.jpg, but it won't find dogs.jpg.

Square brackets [ ]

Is used to specify specific characters or numbers.

Steve[0-9].jpg will find Steve9.jpg but will not find Steve11.jpg

[abc] will find any of the letters a, b, or c but won't look for other letters.

[abcd] will look for a, b, c, d but won't look for other letters.

[A-Z] will find any upper case letter.

[13579] will find any odd number.

[02468] will find any even number

You can use wild cards in searches in Windows and in DOS

There is other wildcards available. The above ones are the most used. To find information on the others, type wildcard in at Google or other search engines.