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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Linux
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I'm afraid this answer isn't 100% correct. There are ways to find out a file's type beyond looking at an extension. For example, there are lots of file formats where all of the files start with a specific sequence of bites, known as a file signature (or as "magic bytes" or "magic numbers").
You can try the
filecommand line tool to check that you can find out a file's format without resorting to its extension, and you can read the tool's manpage to learn how it works.Yes, I know about them and always prove extremely useful every time I receive a file with a wrong/no extension and have little clue about its content. But since the question was about how OP could work with "files with extensions" produced in Windows, I wanted to help clarify what are they, why they are used and that files do not need to be converted or whatever to be opened in Linux as it can "work with them" just fine.