[posted and mailed]
James Frye <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
> On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, John Levon wrote:
>
>> This is not how things work. "PROGRA~1" is most definitely NOT the
>> "real filename".
>
> Well, that gets us into philosophical discussions about the nature of
> reality :-) What I know ('cause I just tried it) is that if I open a
> basic command-line prompt window on Win 2K, and do a "dir \progra~1",
> I get expected output from the dir command. If instead I do "dir
> \Program Files", I get a bunch of "File Not Found" messages. To me
> that says that the "progra~1" version of the filename is at a more
> basic level in the OS.
Not to flog an expiring equine, but
dir "\Program Files"
works in all 32 bit versions of Windows. As to which is the "true" file
name, the 8.3 version of the extended version, my impression is that the
8.3 version was the official file name when they added the capacity for
extended file names (meaning the extended name was essentially an
attribute), and my impression is that now the reverse is true (the long
name is the official one and the 8.3 version is added for backward
compatibility), but I won't swear that's accurate. (I rarely swear *to*
anything about Windows. I frequently swear *at* Windows.)
-- Paul
