What is the difference between the two wildcards .

https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/7.3.0/Data/Specifyinputpathswithwildcards

The ellipsis wildcard searches recursively through directories and any number of levels of subdirectories to find matches.

If you specify a folder separator (for example, //var/log/.../file), it does not match the first folder level, only subfolders.

* The asterisk wildcard matches anything in that specific folder path segment.

Unlike ..., * does not recurse through subfolders.