The next step is to introduce a period, a dot (.). The dot matches any single character except the end of line characters. The following statement will return true:
'abcdef' -match '......'
As the previous expression matches any six characters anywhere in a string, it will also return true when a longer string is provided. There are no implied boundaries on the length of a string (only the number of characters matched):
'abcdefghijkl' -match '......'