Hello:

I had this path the other day: C:\Docume~1\Customer\Locals~1\Temp

I have been told the ~ symbol means that the name in this context or use has been shortened, but what does the '1' mean?

John

I know this answer is late but whatever, I'm new .;D
First this is the DOS 8.3 naming convention. Basically all dos file names have to fit in side the 8character.3character xxxxxxxx.xxx style for dos to recognise a files name. So to deal with the fact that fat32 to can read longer names dos just shortens the name to fit in its way of doing things.
So yea the tilde ~ is the first part of the name being shortened, that will be the same for all shortened file names, but you can't just have all the file names just adding a ~. What if you had two files with similar long names, well dos takes the first file and adds ~1, the next ~2 and so on. So really its just a way for dos to keep track of file names it changes.
So there is my answer...
I was kindly invited to these fine forums by Dan, So Hi Dan! Well I will try to help out as much as I can. And if you would like to check out my websitehttp://www.dylanfogle.com, I sure would appreciate it.

Dylan:

Hey.. it's just so great to KNOW the answer to my question. Thanks!

John

Some very lomg time ago when my computer crashed, the computer renamed al my files using the DOS names(since it was so long ago.. I can't quite remember what they were... however I'll just make up some examples)

Journal of Chocolate- Perfecting an Ice-cream Cake.pdf
Journal of Computer- Security.pdf
Journal of Music- Classical music verses pop.pdf
Journal of Scienc- AIDS and Immunity.pdf
Journal of...
...

All were renamed to

JOURNA~1.pdf
JOURNA~2.pdf
JOURNA~3.pdf
JOURNA~4.pdf
...
JOURN~16.pdf


(as you could probably see, this was very inconvenient!)

Lets say if this was to happen again... is it possible to retrieve the original file names without having to manually retype all of them ?