
Scoping Out Windows 95    \|/    by Lonnie Falk
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~           Publisher

                       LONG FILENAMES! HOORAY!


   Windows 95 allows you to have a filename of up to 255 characters. 
That is surely better than the old eight-character name with the three-
character extension. It means you can find files a whole lot easier - 
and give files meaningful names to be able to do that.

   But what do you do when you need to save a file for use on a system 
that does not (or may not, maybe you don't know for sure) that does not 
run Windows 95?

   The simple answer is that the people at Microsoft have made the long 
file-naming conventions backward-compatible to earlier versions of DOS. 
If you give a file a long name, a short name is also created that will 
work with DOS versions that do not support long names.

   It is probably useful for you to know how this all works. The way 
Windows 95 creates the short filename is to take the first six letters 
of the long name, add a tilde (a character that looks like this: ~) and 
a number, starting with number 1. So, if you name a file "This is a test 
file for Word.doc," the short version of that file would be called 
"THISIS~1.DOC."

   The numbers are sequential, so if you later create a file to the same 
disk named, for example, "This is a nifty letter from Jim.doc," DOS will 
make that file "THISIS~2,doc." As far as this scheme is concerned, the 
two files have the same beginning letters (which, of course, they do).

   If you are a Windows 95 user, you simply do not have to worry about 
this too much at all. The only time you will see the short filenames is 
if you use an MS-DOS window. If you do that and do a "DIR" command, you 
will see much the same display you are used to seeing now with the 
exception that another column has been added to the far right. This 
column will show the long filename.

   You don't really have to worry about it unless you are sending a file 
to someone who does not have Windows 95. If that is the case, merely 
note the short filename to make it easier for your associate to find the 
file.

   What you DO still have to worry about is some of the characters in 
the new long filenames. Yes, you CAN use spaces. But, generally, you 
cannot use ending punctuation-type marks such as periods, colons and the 
like. The period is still used to separate the filename from the 
extension, and the extension (probably because of the Windows 95 
Registry) still uses three-character extensions. 

   We solve this problem here by simply excluding the comma in the date 
when we have a filename like "Letter to Jim Miller on August 17 
1995.doc." Incidentally, the capitalization works just the way you type 
it in.

   While all the multithreading, multitasking capabilities of Windows 95 
are getting a lot of attention, you'll probably think the long filenames 
are one of the best features of this new system. We do.

                                 -=*=-

              Lonnie Falk, Falsoft's CEO, is a computer maven
           who keeps his PC system right on the cusp of the
           bleeding edge. He has been computing since 1980,
           when he bought his first Tandy Color Computer; he 
           later launched the magazine THE RAINBOW, which 
           became THE magazine for fans of the Color Computer. 
           Lonnie is also the mayor of Prospect, Kentucky, and 
           in his spare time enjoys reading novels by Stephen 
           King, Anne Rice and Greg Bear.

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