What's the advantage of having an 8-letter process?

Question

If you run Sticky Note in Windows 7,its process, is called StikyNot.exe. Several other Windows processes keep their process names under 8 letters.

Why do they do that? What is the advantage? Are they just clinging to the past? Or should everybody be publishing 8-letter executables?

Squatness

Answer 1

Raymond Chen of The Old New Thing Blog covered this in: Why do operating system files still adhere to the old 8.3 naming convention?

Hendershot

I don't get it. Why would Disneyland have two rides named "Autopia"? – Possessory

There was one autopia ride, but it had two tracks to increase throughput. Each track exited in a different location. – Hendershot

Answer 2

The old DOS/Windows "short names" were 8.3 and there are still some DDE/RPC/COM facilities and APIs in windows that use them. Plus a few 3rd party products.

Androgen

Answer 3

They are just clinging to the past, there is no advantage of using 8.3 filenames. All filesystems that you care about will support them, if someone's filesystem gets bust and somehow reverts to 8.3 filenames, then they should expect applications to stop working.

A lot of modern windows apps DO use longer filenames. It's a good idea.

Also note that Windows executables don't actually need to end in .exe, but it is difficult to execute them (through Explorer) if they don't; you can still run them using CreateProcess()

Lenitalenitive