Wildcard Character

A wildcard character is a special term used to describe an integer, letter, or symbol that can be used to represent multiple characters. A wildcard character is often referred to using an asterisk or a question mark, wherein the former represents a set of characters, and the latter represents one character. 

Wildcard characters enable IT administrators to write shorter computer commands, eliminating the need to specifically mention each item that a command covers. For instance, say an IT administrator wants to search a computer system for all notepad files using a Windows command prompt. They could simply type ‘dir*.exe.’ into the Windows command line interface to display all notepad files in the directory instead of typing out the entire search command.