Wildcards, including the asterisk and the question mark, are very handy MS-DOS tools that are easier to demonstrate than to explain. See below. As you can see, DOS took the command to mean "Dir anything that that ends in .exe" for the first one, and "Dir anything that starts with keen1." for the second one. Wildcards can be used in a virtually unlimited variety of ways. Whereas the asterisk represents any number of letters/numbers, the question mark represents a single letter/number. For example:   Proceed:     <-- Type, Edit, Attrib         --> Into It