Should folder names start with a period?

Question

Are there any guidelines or standards out there for folder names starting with a period? (e.g.: .NET). I have an installer that requires this to happen and right now we are using 'DotNET' instead of '.NET' for our folder names.

Thanks!

Answer 1

There are no such guidelines in the Windows world.

In unix/linux environments, any file or directory starting with a . is by convention a hidden file/directory.

Answer 2

Folders that start with a period are perfectly fine. If you do any Mono development, however, keep in mind that in unix/linux/GNU, anything that has a period prefix is "hidden" by default.

Answer 3

Historically filenames that start with a '.' character are hidden (Unix, Linux, Mac OS X). On Windows they can be device names. Generally best to avoid file or directory names that start with a '.' character.

Answer 4

There are generally no issues with starting folder names with a period; however, unlike Unix and Linux environments these folders won't be hidden. To do that in Windows you need to set the System attribute on the folder.

Answer 5

Watch out with this; although you can create them programatically, you can't create a file like this with Windows Explorer. Trying in Windows7 to rename a folder to ".net" it complained that I hadn't provided a filename. So this means users and developers might have trouble. It's probably not worth doing.

Microsoft install the framework in \windows\Microsoft.Net, so you might want to use that instead.