prototype name which contains a mix of characters and wildcards. The wildcard * ’matches any group of zero or more characters; the wildcard ? ’ matches any single character. What all this means is that you can specify names without typing them in full, and manipulate groups of similarly named files without specifying each of them individually. Basically, it saves you effort and typing. Wildcards which appear somewhere within double quotes are not expanded. If no match is found with your prototype filename it is passed unchanged. Wildcards are only expanded in the last part of a pathname, so the specification /F0/*/fred.s is incorrect.
The specification /F0/srce/*.s is correct because only the last part of the pathname has a wildcard. Some examples: To delete all of the editor backup files from a disk you would type delete *.bak . The system reads the names of all the files on the disk and attempts to match each name with the prototype. If a match is made the full filename is substituted into your command line. To delete the files ‘file1’ and ‘file2’, but not ‘file34’ you would type delete file? . The question mark matches the single characters ‘1’ and 2’ but not the double character ‘34’. To experiment with wildcard matching you can create files by typing >filename and then use the inbuilt command echo to find matches.
For example, echo * prints out all filenames; echo *c? prints out all filenames which have a as their second last character. Wildcardexpansionstopswhenthetemplateismatched,soyoucanhaveawildcard early in a filename, but restrict matching to a series of letters later in the filename. For example *book.doc will match only files that end in ‘book.doc’, and ignore files that don’t have ‘book.doc’ in them. Since wildcard expansion is done by 1616/OS , rather than by individual commands, it is entirely consistent from command to command. That is, wildcard expansion by dir is the same as by echo , and is the same as by delete , type , cat , move , copy , and so on.
Some operating systems, such as MS-DOS, get this wrong, and therefore don’t do wildcard expansion correctly (or at all, for some commands such as type ). In addition to the simple wildcards * and ? , the Applix 1616 allows "grouping" of letters by means of the brackets [ and ] , and these can be used to indicate a range of letters for matching. For example echo [a-c]* will match any file names commencing with the letters a to c. The same effect occurs using echo [abc]*. You can also negate the effects of this (and thus exclude a particular range) by using ~ before a group. Thus echo [~a-c]* will show all file names that don’t commence with a to c.
Similarly, echo [a-d][x-z]* will match any filenames starting with a to d, followed by x to z as a second letter. The best way to learn how this works is to experiment with the echo command, and a group of junk files. Page 28 User Tutorial Manual Command Handling