# Very old files on my computer that are mislabeled **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [January 23, 2023, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/very-old-files-on-my-computer-that-are-mislabeled/978676 "2023-01-23T19:57:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 9
**Author:** ![Joey\_P](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/919ad9/32.png) [@Joey\_P](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Joey_P)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2023, 10:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/very-old-files-on-my-computer-that-are-mislabeled/978676/9 "2023-01-24T22:20:17Z")
> [@slicedalone](#): > > I don’t think I was doing anything different this time. (Is it even possible to right-click in different ways? Rightclicking is rightclicking, no?) Right clicking is right clicking, but if you want to change a file name (even right from the icon on the desktop), it’s two single left clicks. Click on it, then click on it again, not a double click. > [@slicedalone](#): > > And choose what? Notepad? Yes. > [@Joey\_P](#): > > My first thought would be to just tell Windows to open them in notepad. If you’re lucky, they’ll be text, or mostly text, or at least include enough plain text that you can figure out what they actually are. > You don’t even need to change the extension, just right click on it and go to “open with”. > [@slicedalone](#): > > Or did these filenamesdotsuffixes work at some point on some primitive system? If you’ve really had those files on your computer since the 90’s (so, either DOS, Win 3.1 or Windows 95/98/ME), the file names probably got corrupted at some point. It’s not uncommon for a file to mysteriously lose it’s extension and end up with something like what you have. _Especially_ if the files ever moved back and forth between a system that only allowed 8 character (plus extension) file names and ones that allowed longer ones. So, if you created a file at work/school on a Windows 95 box and called it "bookproposal.txt, and then stuck the disk in your home computer with Win3.1, it might turn it into bookprop.osa. Here’s how I screwed up an entire directory of files by attempting to manipulate them in DOS without realizing that DOS couldn’t handle the longer file names. To this day, what, 30 years later, when I still get a little twinge of anxiety every time I see a file that ends with ~1. > [@So I managed to rename all of the files in a directory to the same name](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-i-managed-to-rename-all-of-the-files-in-a-directory-to-the-same-name/693087/11): > > Back when Win95 just showed up and allowed you to give your files longer names AND had some system files with longer names I did something stupid like that. I was doing something DOS based, attempted to do something or other to an entire directory and DOS shortened everything to 8 characters. That is, the first 6 original letters of the file name + ~1. So, for example, WIN95BOOOTFILE.BAT would have turned into WIN95B~1.BAT (or ~2 etc if that created a duplicate). That, was a mess. Luckily, I… --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/very-old-files-on-my-computer-that-are-mislabeled/978676)._