File Masks & Wildcards |
File masks and wildcard characters are supported in any action or trigger parameters that indicate folder or file names, commonly, the File system, Compression, Cryptography and FTP actions. A file mask is essentially a pattern of fixed and wildcard characters used to match folder and file names. They provide a flexible means for identification of a specific file or group of files based on their name and extension. A wildcard character can be used to substitute for any other character or characters in a string. By using masks and wildcards, you can easily specify which files and/or folders should be processed and which should be ignored.
File masks can consist of any combination of the following:
Fixed characters - Letters, numbers and other characters allowed in file names.
Question mark (?) - Represents any single character.
Asterisk (*) - Represents any sequence of characters (including no characters at all).
While it is well-defined that a file mask containing only fixed characters
uniquely identifies a file (e.g.,the file mask myFile.txt
refers to, and only to, a text file named myFile.txt),
a file mask containing wildcard characters ?
and/or * can
refer to single or multiple files.
In most contexts, you can specify multiple files or combine several wildcard masks by separating each with a pipe (|) character. For example, the following mask includes all JPG and GIF images contained in c:\temp\:
c:\temp\*.jpg|*.gif
Wildcards allow a file mask to match multiple folder or file names. The table below provides a variety of file mask examples.
File Mask |
Description & Examples |
* |
Matches all files containing any amount of characters, with or without extensions (e.g., entering A* would match any file or folder starting with the letter A followed by any amount of characters). |
*.* |
Matches all files containing any amount of characters and with any extension. Even matches files that don't have an extension (e.g., entering A*.* would match any file starting with the letter A followed by any amount of characters along with any extension). |
? |
Matches any single character (e.g., entering A? would match any file starting with the letter A followed by any single character). |
*.png |
Matches all files with names containing any amount of characters with a .png extension (e.g., image_name.png, cool_pic.png, 1.png). |
*.p* |
Matches all files with names containing any amount of characters with an extension starting with the letter p (e.g., document.pdf, image_name.png, business.project, 1.ppt) |
|
Matches all files with names that start with pic (e.g., picture_name.png, pictogram.ico, picker.html, pic). |
|
Matches all .html files with names starting with any sequence of characters, followed by the string mat, and ending with a single character (e.g., automate.html, mate.html, tomato.html). |
?????? |
Matches all files with names containing six characters and without an extension (e.g., 123456, myFile, my_pic, images) |
|
Matches all .pdf files with names that start with doc followed by any five characters (e.g., document.pdf, doctrine.pdf, doc_1234.pdf). |
file1.txt|file2.jpg|file3.png |
Matches specific filenames or wildcard masks that reside in the same directory (e.g., c:\temp\file1.txt|file2.jpg|file3.png). |
c:\temp1\*.txt|c:\temp2\*.png |
Matches specific filenames or wildcard masks that reside in different directories (e.g., c:\photos\*.jpg|\c:\music\*.mp3). |