Globbing

What is globbing?
Globbing is the process of using characters to request or evaluate groups of files with the same partial names or character sets. Users represent an unrecognized character or string to search for a larger set of file names in a particular domain.

Two of the most common forms of globbing use a question mark to represent a specific unnamed character in the file and use an asterisk to search for a continuous string. But of these two methods, the asterisk method is likely the more popular and stems from popular use of PC-DOS command line operating systems. In these systems, a user would enter a command to search the drive to return lists of filenames with the same extensions or with the same subtitles. Since the file extension comes after the period in the file name, the user can get a list of all files with a particular extension with a command like this:

<*. exe>

On the other hand, users could search for partial titles by typing other characters with the asterisk to the left of the period - for example, for a list of executables with titles including the 'run' character set, the command would look like this:

Another use of globbing is in a specific type of hacking that promotes a denial of service attack. Globbing requires some resources on the server side to look for many different files in a large archive of files. Essentially, creating sufficiently vague globbing commands can cause the server to go on a wild hunt and consume those resources.