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generally means "all kinds of every type" but comes from meaning "every possible filename, of every possible extension" in the context of computer command line interfaces. In an MS-DOS sense, say there were the files SETUP.BAT, MOUSE.BIN, INSTALL.EXE, and IO.SYS in a particular folder (which was called a directory, then). If you wanted to delete everything that had the Batch extension, you could type DEL *.BAT at the command line to remove them. Or, if you wanted to delete every file that began with an I, but only the ones that were Executables, you would type I*.EXE at the command line. If you typed DEL *.* at the command line, every file in that folder would be deleted, of any name and of any extension.
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