@paddi@xr18b you are formally right. yes. there is no such thing as a real wildcard in regex. "." in regex is "one arbitrary character". you can expand using * or + to "zero or more arbitrary characters" or "one or more arbitrary characters" respectively. as such , * takes the role of a quantifier rather than a wildcard. the * in filename expansion is not a regex in the mathematical sense. as it is not mighty enough to parse a regular language.