I wish I could make Windows handle short filenames better. Your wish is granted! Windows 95 allows the use of long filenames, but older versions of Windows and DOS can only work with filenames that use the older eight-character naming style. MYLETTER.DOC is an example of this style. When you use long filenames, Windows 95 also creates a short version of the name by removing excess characters, allowing older DOS or Windows applications to use these files as well. This works great until you have two files with the same initial eight characters. One file might accidentally overwrite another. To avoid this, Windows 95 inserts tildes (~) and numbers in the filenames. More often than not, however, your filenames will not conflict with each other. Unfortunately, Windows 95 always uses tildes (~) and numbers in short filenames. This can make the resulting short filenames needlessly less descriptive of their contents. To solve this problem, you may want to limit Windows to using tildes in short file names only when necessary to prevent filename conficts. |