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Yes, UNIX's never had a concept of a limited length file extension. Until the 1980s filenames were limited to 14 characters in total, but you could put a dot a
by bodyfour 12y ago
Yes, UNIX's never had a concept of a limited length file extension. Until the 1980s filenames were limited to 14 characters in total, but you could put a dot anywhere you like in it.
I was specifically referring to the part of the article that the author claimed that windows inherited it from MS-DOS, which inherited it from CP/M. The chain goes back farther than that -- by the time CP/M was written the 3-character file extension was well-established. In general CP/M was influenced a lot by the DEC minicomputer OSes (its "PIP" command is one obvious example)
- rakoo 12y ago> UNIX's never had a concept of a limited length file extension AFAICT, UNIX never had a concept of file extensions.
- bodyfour 12y agoAt the filesystem layer? No, never. However even in the earliest of days file extensions were common. They followed the usual UNIX preference for brevity: ".c", ".h", ".o", and ".a" were all early arrivals. So even though they didn't cram extensions into the filesystem, they weren't allergic to it as a convention. In the 80s you started seeing things like "resolv.conf" appear, so they didn't stay mostly-single-character for long.