How to Delete Files with Wildcards?

Introduction

There are definitely many wildcards like the asterisk (*) and the question mark (?) as placeholders or formatting characters in your computer that take much space in your hard disk. Manually searching for and removing these characters from a document can be a tedious task. Fortunately, Disk Cleaner Free is able to make the process easier.

Step 1. Choose Hard Disk

Launch Disk Cleaner Free and you’ll find a list of hard disks in your computer, (including USB flash drives if they are connected). Check one or more of them for cleaning.

 

Step 2. Set Cleaning Options

Click “Options” to set how the cleaner runs. In “General” tab, you can decide how you want the junk files dealt with:

Normally remove – the deleted files does not go into Recycle Bin and gets wiped away from your hard drive. It is just like the way you use Shift + Deleteto remove the files. Actually, it does still leave traces but they are just a little harder to find. Some recover tools may be able to recover them.

Move to recycle bin – move the useless files to recycle bin. It is a safer choice in case some errors occur after cleanup. You can restore the deleted files.

Shred – overwrite files with random data and erase them to make sure the files are permanently gone. The is useful when you need to delete some stubborn files or need to protect your privacy and eliminate the possibility that someone might see or recover them.

Check “Display confirmation dialog” if you want to confirm whether to delete the file or not.

The “Browsers” section has a list of all your browsers installed in your computer such as Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari, and so on. Check the browsers needed to be cleaned. Then you can choose to include or exclude items like cookies, cache and history from the cleaning process.

 

Some additional options are also provided here:File search masks – delete all files with wildcards in the customizable list
Temporary directory – empty all the temporary directories
Recently used documents – remove the history of recently used documents
Recycle bin – empty the recycle bin
Old update files – remove Windows update source files (make sure that all patches have already been installed before you do this)
System log – delete system log files

Step 3. Start Cleaning

Click “Run” and the program will scan your selected hard disks and list all the files that need to be deleted.

 

 

You can check one by one or click “Enable all” to select all of them. Click “Disable all” if you do not want to delete all. Click “Next” to start deleting the selected files. Within seconds, the process will be finished.

Click “Next” to start deleting the selected files. Within seconds, the process will be finished.