<operating system, programming, text> (From card games in which certain "wild" cards, often the joker, can take the place of any other card) A special character which matches any character in a string comparison.
In Unix filenames, for example, '?' matches any single character and '*' matches any zero or more characters. In regular expressions, '.' matches any character and '.*' matches any zero or more characters.
(29 May 1996)