Wildcards are special characters that act as placeholders for other characters. They are incredibly powerful when you want to perform operations on groups of files rather than one at a time. The two most common are * and ?.
Try the command
Try using a wildcard pattern!
Build the command
dir
?Matches exactly one character. e.g. file?.txt matches file1.txt but not file10.txt.
Terminal
C:\Users\User>dir *.txt
Real-World Examples
List all text files:
Command Prompt
C:\Users\User>dir *.txt
Match files with a specific pattern:
Command Prompt
C:\Users\User>dir img_??.jpg
Knowledge Check
1 / 2Which wildcard matches any number of characters?
References
These documentation links provide authoritative details for the commands used in this article.