- For compatibility, every Windoze file gets an old-school
“8+3” name. In W98/Me, if you type dir after
you Run » command
you’ll see the long and 8+3 names together. (In Win2K/XP, use
dir /x and launch Command Prompt from the Start menu,
under [ All Programs » ] Accessories.)
- Folder names generally
have a null extension, but it’s not a requirement —
cd "Acrobat 6.0" is
equivalent to cd ACROBA~1.0 (but simply cd ACROBA~1
is different and will not work).
- The 3-character part of the short filename is the extension,
sometimes incorrectly referred to as the file type.
A file of type “image/jpeg” might be named using an
extension of .JPG, .JPEG, .JPE,
.JFIF, or no extension at all.
(Usually only files imported from non-Windoze systems truly have
no extension. Also note that in the 8+3 name, .jpeg
and .jfif
reduce respectively to .JPE and .JFI.) A file named
with an extension of .INF might contain, say, Inform
source code … or Windoze install parameters — two
completely different file types. Here’s a handy list of
commonly encountered file types.
- Your Folder Options (accessed through Tools or View on various
Windoze Explorer versions) may cause an 8+3 name to display in
mixed or all lower case, and applications [e.g. web
browsers] have case-insensitive access to local files with
8+3 names, but 8+3 names always revert to pure upper case
when seen across a network or copied to a floppy disk or
some flash and ZIP drives. (This can bite you when you upload a file
to a case-sensitive web server!)
Also, re-saving a file from a legacy utility like Debug can
remove its long name, leaving only the 8+3 name. (You
can’t remove the 8+3 name without losing the file, since
it sits at the very beginning of the file’s directory entry.)
- Folder options can suppress display of the extension. This is
a dangerous feature that you should turn off by UNchecking the option
Hide extensions for known file types — unless you want to
risk turning loose malware like MyWorm.jpg.vbs on your PC.
- Windoze when opening a file will guess a file’s type
(and opener application) from its extension by blindly obeying the
file associations list. (Compare to MacOS, where each file’s
directory entry can designate a preferred opener application,
regardless of the file’s name.) When entering opener
application paths in the file associations [aka Open With] table,
call out all folder names in 8+3 style
(e.g. ACROBA~1.0 above) — unless you
want to waste time repairing file associations that don’t
even look broken.
Read more about the care and feeding of file associations at this
M$ help page.
- A file has both long and short versions of its name only if it
needs to — i.e. if the true name contains spaces, special
characters beyond -_!~$%^&'()` , more than
eight characters before [or three after] a dot, or more than one dot:
- index.html is INDEX~1.HTM
- Black Dog.mp3 is BLACKD~1.MP3 (not
BLACK_~1.MP3)
- dot[0].gif is DOT_0_~1.GIF
- nn.4.79 is NN4~1.79
- MyWorm.vbs is MYWORM.VBS (but probably
MYWORM~1.VBS on Windoze local disks,
because of mixed case)
- Yes, long filenames work in VB, as long as they’re
"in double quotes" (or even better, dropped into
a String variable). What trips people up is that VB may be looking
for the file in a different place than you’d expect. If you
launch, say, Excel from a shortcut, the folder named in the
shortcut’s Starts in: property becomes the
initial home directory where VB looks for files referenced in
your scripts. [Actually, I now find, there’s an overriding
setting in Excel at Tools • Options • General, under
Default file location.] In either case, this setting
can shift while Excel is running —
if a user navigates away from the default directory to open
a file manually, the VB current directory follows!
So to be sure of where you are,
precede each VB Open command with a ChDir to a full path from drive
root, like this (the first \ is very important)
ChDir "\Documents and Settings\fulano\My Documents\Payroll"
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