operating system, programming, text (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
regularexpressions, '.' matches any one character and "[...]"
matches any one of the enclosed characters.
(1997-07-16)