*: In the shell, the asterisk is a wild card much like in dos/Windows. It can stand for one or more characters.

Also, in the majority of modern programing and scripting languages, the asterisk indicates multiplication, two adjacent asterisks indicate exponentiation (raising a number to a power).

The process of expanding a shell expression containing * or ? or [...] expressions into a list of matching filenames is called "globbing."

Note: There are differences between MS-DOS wildcard handling and UNIX/Linux glob handling.

Contributors

• RandyKramer - 16 Feb 2002
• JimDennis - 22 Sep 2003
• <If you edit this page, add your name here, move this to the next line>