Most other parts of Windows, including the Indexing Service, use the MS-DOS style of wildcards found in CMD. A relic of the 8.3 filename age, this syntax pays special attention to dots in the pattern and the text (filename). Internally this is done using three extra wildcard characters, . On the Windows API end, the equivalent is , and corresponds to its underlying . (Another fnmatch analogue is .) Both open-source msvcrt expanders use , so 8.3 filename quirks will also apply in them.