exclusion characters

[sericbiz1]

I've looked through posts for ways of excluding url's but I wanted to know if you had a list of exclusion characters and what they exclude?

I've seen '*/$' for instance but don't know what it is excluding. I have also seen 'sort=' as a special command but don't know what it's for. A list of any and all special characters/commands would be much appreciated.

I would also like to know how to exclude a parent directory without excluding a child directory such as
www.sitename.com/parentdirectory/childdirectory

[XML-Sitemaps Support]

Hello,

you specify a substring of URL that you don't want to have included in sitemap.
If you want to exclude parent folder only, you can use this:
.*parentdirectory/$

("$" means the end of URL)

[sericbiz1]

What does '*' identify?

[XML-Sitemaps Support]

It means "any number of characters".