Working with decimal representations of
binary wildcard mask bits can be tedious. For the most common uses of wildcard masking, you can
use abbreviation words. These abbreviation words reduce how many
numbers an administrator will be required to enter while configuring
address test conditions. One example where you can use an abbreviation
instead of a long wildcard mask string is when you want to match any
address.
Consider a network administrator who
wants to specify that any destination address will be permitted in an
access list test. To indicate any IP address, the administrator would
enter 0.0.0.0; then to indicate that the access list should ignore
(allow without checking) any value, the corresponding wildcard mask
bits for this address would be all ones (that is, 255.255.255.255).
The administrator can use the
abbreviation any to communicate this same test condition to Cisco IOS
access list software. Instead of typing 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255, the
administrator can use the word any by itself as the keyword.
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