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.