Best Practices – File Names

With the advent of drag and drop technologies over the years, and with the depletion of core technical competencies, have come some pretty bad practices with file names. While most file name caveats have been addressed through the years they can still be a problem in some areas.

Unix type systems are case sensitive. Mixing upper and lower case in your HTML or other coding is going to be a very bad idea. And, while Windows supports some wide open boundaries with regards to file names, many of the programs which are installed on the computer may not be so lenient. Just because Windows can see the file doesn’t necessarily mean the program will.

The most common places which file names will affect you are really all of the important ones. Backup software or other scripting may react badly to spaces in file names, or special characters such as ` (which in Perl and many other environments is an escape shell code character). Another gotcha for file names is in SQL driven data sheets.

Basically if you boil your file creation habits down to the following guidelines life will be a lot simpler for your administrators and coders.

1. Avoid mixing case. Always use lower case unless otherwise specified or markedly required.
2. Do NOT put spaces in file names. This is a lazy mistake, and is causing your operating system lots of grief. Not to mention it can cause FTP and some scripting to malfunction. Instead substitute spaces with underscores. For example the file name “one two.pdf” should be “one_two.pdf”.
3. Do NOT put special characters in file names. Examples of these are !@#$%^&*()
4. If you store ordered data, or warehouse data, name files with the YYMMDDHHVV convention. This means you name the file beginning with (for today which is August 2, 2008) 08080213_sample.txt. In this case YY is the year, MM is the month, DD is the day, and VV represents a 2 digit sub-version number so that if you save more than one file per hour, you need’nt include seconds. In this way your files will automatically be delineated in their listing by the logical file name. Don’t put the date at the end of the filename because it breaks this convention.
5. Keep file names under 16 characters long to avoid truncation of listed file names on some soft wares.

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About InnerTechnical.com

InnerTechnical.com was founded by a group of individuals whom, at the time of inception, were working for companies that had some very specific needs and no way to fill them. From Linux Networks and Systems Administration, to High Availability Server Platforms like Reverse-Proxy, to RF Engineering, to Dark Fiber. It became apparent there was a gross need in American corporate infrastructure for greater organization, and consolidation where IT is concerned. Especially with so many companies out there taking the bait on “vaporware”.

Most of these companies had the demand, but there was some “black box”, or “legacy network”, or “software expense” that kept the need from being served.

InnerTechnical.com’s goal is to facilitate filling that need by providing experts in that particular form of technology who can analyze your situation, make safe/sane recommendations, perform network design and engineering based around your needs or existing model, and give businesses with high technology needs the tools they need to eliminate their problems. Machines and technology should work for people, not the other way around.

Our S.M.E.s (or Subject Matter Experts) are comprised of a group of the top minds in the tech fields. Each of them is very experienced on a broad scale with technology, and each of them has a highly trained focus in the school of thought in which they operate.

Best practices should never be ignored, even when they are extremely tedious or seemingly not needed (until perhaps later down the line). Many people will take the “easy way” or the “fast way” over the “right way”. The problem with this strategy should be apparent, particularly in technology realms, because its almost a sure recipe for disaster later on. Many “short cuts” will introduce logic bombs, and system interdependencies which in technology can be a very bad thing because if one system goes down, they ALL go down.

One bad apple really can spoil the whole bunch, so let us spot your bad apple for you, and show you how to make a little cider!