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  How did wildcards work in MS-DOS?
Time: 00:02 EST/05:02 GMT | News Source: Microsoft | Posted By: Kenneth van Surksum

The rules were simple but led to complicated results.

MS-DOS files were eleven characters long with an implicit dot between characters eight and nine. Theoretically, spaces were permitted anywhere, but in practice they could appear only at the end of the file name or immediately before the implicit dot.

Wildcard matching was actually very simple. The program passed an eleven-character pattern; each position in the pattern consisted either of a file name character (which had to match exactly) or consisted of a question mark (which matched anything). Consider the file "ABCD····TXT", where I've used · to represent a space. This file name would more traditionally be written as ABCD.TXT, but I've written it out in its raw 11-character format to make the matching more obvious. Let's look at some patterns and whether they would match.

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