JB>> Actually, under earlier versions of (eg 6.22) dos *s meant *.* :)

 TM> I don't remember it being likke that!

He's right.  Many versions of MS-DOS would ignore anything following an
asterisk (but not crossing the boundary between name and extension, of
course). "*CO*.EXE" would thus be, effectively,
"*.EXE", for example.  

Because of this (and it was DOS itself doing this, not the command
interpreter), 4DOS had to layer its own pattern matching on top of that
provided by MS-DOS.  So, taking the previous example, 4DOS would receive
all of the names ending in ".EXE" from MS-DOS, and would then
itself have to filter out those that didn't contain the letters
"CO" in the basename part.

 ¯ JdeBP ®

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