wild card

wild card

See wild cards and wildcard mask.

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wild card

1. See wild (sense 4)

2. Computing a symbol that can represent any character or group of characters, as in a filename

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wild card [′wīld ‚kärd]

(computer science)

A symbolic character in a search argument such that any character will satisfy it.

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(operating system, programming, text)

wild card - (From card games in which certain cards, often the joker, can act as any other card) A special character or character sequence which matches any character in a string comparison, like ellipsis ("...") in ordinary written text. In Unix filenames '?' matches any single character and '*' matches any zero or more characters. In regular expressions, '.' matches any one character and "[...]" matches any one of the enclosed characters. See also Backus-Naur Form.