Wildcard Expansion
The latest version of this topic can be found at Wildcard Expansion.
Microsoft Specific
You can use wildcards — the question mark (?) and asterisk (*) — to specify filename and path arguments on the command-line.
Command-line arguments are handled by a routine called _setargv (or _wsetargv in the wide-character environment), which by default does not expand wildcards into separate strings in the argv string array. For more information on enabling wildcard expansion, refer to Expanding Wildcard Arguments.