The $* allows you to iterates over all the token contained in $1-, like a while loop, $* left the help file a while ago, after while loops were introduced, it's now an undocumented identifier.

$* is extremely powerful because is it much faster than using a while loop on a list of token, consider the following:

var %list a b c d,%a 1
while ($gettok(%list,%a,32)) {
echo -a $v1
inc %a
}

this can be written as

tokenize 32 a b c d | echo -a $*

And it's faster, cool isn't it?

Notes & quirks

Why was the $* identifiers removed from the help file? Well because it doesn't really work the same way the others identifiers does, and because it's quirky:

mIRC takes the command $* appears in and replace all of its occurences in the line by a special marker: `~$*: you can see that by doing for example:

//tokenize 32 abcd | echo -a $left($*,1) $+ $chr(3) $+ $mid($*,2)

Let's take a look at this: //tokenize 32 abcd | echo -a $mid($*,2)

Why isn't this returning bcd? That's because of the usage of the special marker `~$*, mIRC store that the command is "echo -a $mid(`~$*,2)".

Then for each token, (here only $1 == abcd), evaluate the line first, here $mid(`~$*,2) is ~$*, and then mIRC replaces the marker by the token and execute the echo command, however after an operation like $mid here, that marker can't be found, you basically cannot get the correct value of $* inside an identifier.

There is a workaround to that issue though, with scid and scon:

//tokenize 32 abcd | scon -r echo -a $!mid( $* ,2)

Here mIRC replace $* by the marker, but scon has an extra evaluation system which fits perfectly here, $* mechanism is enabled on scon, mIRC store the command of the $* as "scon -r echo -a $!mid( `~$* ,2)"

Then for each token, mIRC evaluates the line, which becomes: "scon -r echo -a $mid( abcd ,2)" and then finally the scon command is executed, resulting in the expected value echoed.

Another issue is that you cannot call $* more than once in the same scope the command will simply be skipped, however... this can be worked around :)

If you retokenize after using $*, forcing the update of $1-, you can use $* again but only if the number of tokens you pass is higher than the previous number of token you passed, and $* will only start from that previous number of token + 1:

//tokenize 32 1 2 3 | echo -a $* | tokenize 32 4 5 6 7 8 | echo -a $* | echo -a here

As you can see with this line, the second tokenize's first 3 token "4 5 6" are dumb tokens passed to fill in the gap, you can use $1- in front of your next tokenize command to start from those new tokens, like a normal situation.