Shortcuts and Wildcards

Shortcuts

A number of Dos commands recognise certain shortcuts when navigating between directories. The best known of these are:

.	to refer to the current directory
..	to refer to the parent directory
\	to refer to the root directory of the current drive.
drive:	to refer to the current directory on drive

Examples:

1. If the current directory on the c: drive is c:\data\docs\letters, then:
   dir c:
   at the a:> prompt will list the files in c:\data\docs\letters

2. If the current drive and directory is c:\data\docs\letters, then:

   Command	.	..	...	\
   CD ChDir	Nothing. Current directory stays as: c:\data\docs\letters	Change to parent directory: c:\data\docs	Change to parent's parent directory: c:\data	Change to root directory: c:\
   DIR	Displays current directory: c:\data\docs\letters	Displays parent directory: c:\data\docs	Displays parent's parent directory: c:\data	Displays root directory: c:\

3. If the current drive and directory is c:\, then:

   Command	.	..	...	\
   CD ChDir	Nothing - current directory stays as: c:\	Error message: "Invalid Directory"	Error message: "Invalid Directory"	Nothing. Current directory stays as: c:\
   DIR	Displays current directory: c:\	Error message: "Invalid Directory"	Displays directories and extensionless files of current directory	Displays root directory: c:\

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Wildcards

Many Dos commands associated with file handling (eg. ATTRIB, COPY, DEL, DELTREE, etc.) accept the use of the "wildcards" (* and ?).

In general terms, * refers to multiple characters and ? refers to a single character in a file or directory name.

Wildcard	Typical interpretation
*.*	All files with all extensions.
*letter*.*	All files with "letter" anywhere in its name.
*smith.*	All files with names ending with "smith" (or "Smith")
Test?.txt	All files named "test" + one character and with txt extensions (eg test1.txt, but not test-a.txt nor test.txt)
?e*.*	All files with an "e" as second letter in their names

It should be noted that not all commands handle wildcards in exactly the same way. For example DIR * and DIR *.* are considered synonymous but DEL * would delete only files without an extension.

Note also that when using long file names, the concept of "filename + extension" becomes somewhat confused. If a file name contains more than one period, Dos assumes (usually) that the last period separates "filename" and the "extension" - however long that "extension" may be.