An asterisk (*) matches 0 or more characters, any character, including blank. It does not cross NULL or \, which means it only matches a file name, not an entire path.

A question mark (?) matches 1 character, unless what it would match is a period (.) or the terminating NULL, in which case it matches 0 characters. It also does not cross the backslash character (\).

Any character, other than asterisks and question marks, matches itself, including a period.

Searching is case-insensitive. For example, "FILE.TXT" references the same file named "file.txt".

For compatibility reasons, any file name that does not have a dot in it gets an implicit one automatically appended to the end during searching operations. This means that searching for "FILE." would return "FILE".

Some file system functions accept file object name specifications using metacharacters.