Network, Computer and Programming Resources

Network - * (Asterisk)

In several operating systems, the asterisk serves as a wildcard character: to represent one or more characters, such as in a file name or extension. For example, a* matches act, actor, and and, but not band. In pattern matching involving regular expressions, the asterisk matches the occurrences of the single character immediately preceding it. For example, ba*th matches bth, bath, and baaaaath, but not bbath. In e-mail and in other contexts that use plain text, asterisks are sometimes used around words or phrases to indicate emphasis. For example, "I *really* want to emphasize the second word in this sentence."