The mark of absolute
DoS stupidity, "*.*" has come to equal "everything". This is because creators of the
Quick And Dirty Operating System were either too
incompetent or just didn't
give a shit for
clean implementation; the "." in
FAT filenames isn't really a dot, it's just what is displayed between the 8th and 9th character in the 11-character filename. Of course, characters n - 8 might be invisible, but that doesn't change anything. So, "*.*" really would mean "
glob '*' to name1 and glob '*' to name2 and take whatever matches.
...except that this isn't so either. I don't know if they considered it taking too much CPU, but the '*' isn't a true glob-* either. Try "*foo*.*" - it will match anything, except in decent shells. This leads me to believe that in micros~1 pattern matching standard, '*' is defined as "absence of '*' in the beginning of string is equivalent to regexpian '^', and absence of '*' in the end of string is equivalent to '$', '*' anywhere else will just fsck everything up".