dan Perry here with another Dan on tech command prompt video sometimes what we need to do is work on a group of files and to do that we can use wildcards now there are two wild cards that are used with DOS there is the asterisk and that says any file name any length the Astor it goes at the end of what you do know the other is the question mark and that's a single character and that is position dependent so by using the combinations of asterisks and question marks we can choose groups of files that we want to work with when we're using or working with a lot of the DOS applications that includes the directory copy and almost anything that requires you to supply a file name if I just do a directory I can see I've got several files and if for example I wanted only files with an extension of fil I could do asterisk saying any file name dot fil and that will list just files the Heaven a file extension that would be using the a string I could do directory of T asterisk and that would get any file starting in the letter T so test test once it s to test file the directory - if I use the question mark I could do for example question mark est dot asterisk to get anything that starts with a letter any letter R starts with a character but the second third and fourth character are e st and we don't care about the extension so that got test and best if I change that into question mark est asterisk now he got test 1 and test 2 as well before I specified that I didn't care about the file name but it had to be four characters in the file or the extension rather four characters in the file name and we didn't care what it started with and that's why it got best end test this one we say the first character we don't care about the second third and fourth character our est and we don't care about the rest of it now we can use that with say the copy command and I could copy anything we don't care about the first character est dot fil so anything that was starts with any character but ends est or e I've got X it won't get anything est and any file name and I want to copy it to the folder too if I want to use the same names I can do asterisk dot asterik if I didn't put anything there it would also use the same name so it's going to ask me in this case if I want to override test file test file was already in that folder so I'm gonna go ahead and say yes and it copied it over if I had said no it still would have copied best but not test I can change parts of the files so I could say okay I want those same two files but I want to change the extension to be a case a for backup and it copied both of them and now if I look in the two file they're the two that I copied the first time but then we've got best and test dot bak those backups so using the wildcards I can work with groups of file thank you for watching this Dan on tech video please subscribe to this playlist so you don't miss future videos please check out and subscribe to our other dan on tech channel playlists