Final answer:
In Shell scripting, the '*' character is a wild card used to match zero or more characters in file names or strings.
Step-by-step explanation:
In the context of Shell scripting, the character considered a wild card is the asterisk *. The wild card character is used to match zero or more characters in a string or file name. For example, if you are in a directory with files named 'text1.txt', 'text2.txt', and 'notatext.txt', typing the command ls text* would list the first two files, as the * would match the characters that come after 'text' in those file names.