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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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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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Sounds like a Windows problem
I get the frustration, but Windows is the one that strayed from convention/standard.
Also, i should've asked this earlier, but doesn't Windows also only look at the characters following the last dot in the filename when determining the file type? If so, then this should be fine for Windows, since there's only one canonical file extension at a time, right?
Very good point. Though, i would argue that this would be much less of a problem if Windows stopped sometimes hiding file extensions.
I don't believe what you're referring to is really a Windows versus Linux/Unix thing.
I disagree, but i do get what you're saying here. I don't think that example really works though, because a
.mp4file isn't derived from a.h264file. A.mp4is a container that may include h264-encoded video, but it may also have a channel with Opus-encoded audio or something. It's apples and oranges.Also, even though there shouldn't be any technical issues with this on Windows, you can still use a typical short filename suffix if you wish, though i would argue that using the long filename suffix is more expressive. From "tar (computing)" on Wikipedia:
I think part of the reason why the long extension is often preferred is because it's much clearer and it's guaranteed to be supported and decompressed by the respective tools. Even when they don't suppot tar archives, they'll just give you the uncompressed tar in that case.
It's also very common to do that with other extensions (not just
.tar) when compressing big files. For example, when archiving logs they'll often be stored as.log.gz, which makes it automatically clear that it's a log file directly compressed withgzipand meant to be examined with tools likezcatandzlessto view it.And in cases like that you really need it to be clear on what data does the gzip stores, since it does not keep metadata about the file so you might not be able to get back the original name/extension of the file if you rename the gz file.