# Recoll user manual
More about wildcards

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#### Wildcards and path filtering

Due to the way that Recoll processes wildcards inside `dir` path filtering clauses, they will have a multiplicative effect on the query size. A clause containg wildcards in several paths elements, like, for example, `dir:``/home/me/*/*/docdir`, will almost certainly fail if your indexed tree is of any realistic size.

Depending on the case, you may be able to work around the issue by specifying the paths elements more narrowly, with a constant prefix, or by using 2 separate `dir:` clauses instead of multiple wildcards, as in `dir:``/home/me` `dir:``docdir`. The latter query is not equivalent to the initial one because it does not specify a number of directory levels, but that's the best we can do (and it may be actually more useful in some cases).

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