Is it safe to delete files with extensions containing non-alphanumeric characters

disk-spacefile extensionfile managementtemporary-files

I was working with Eagle 4.16r2 (Yes I know its old), and when I work on my project in it, I happen to save my work frequently as files with extensions .brd and .sch.

I just did a backup and now I see a ton of files which I did not create. The core name is the same name I used but the extensions are .s#n and .b#n where n is a number (and '#' is actually in the extension), and it seems each of these files that are created roughly are the same size in disk space as the ones with the proper extensions.

In the program itself when I'm browsing for the files, only the files with the proper extensions are listed.

So is it always safe to delete files with extensions containing non-alphanumeric characters?

Best Answer

No, temporary file handling is entirely determined by the application that manages the files; there are no rules or even conventions across apps.

Related Solutions

Executable File Extensions on Windows

The basic "executable" files (the ones Windows looks to execute via the PATH) are stored in an environmental variable called PATHEXT. You can see this from a command prompt:

C:\>set PATHEXT

On my machine, I get this (WinXP):

PATHEXT=.COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.VBE;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH;.PSC1

This is not an exclusive list. Windows will also execute other files (for instance, screen savers have an extension of .scr and are executables); Windows will also allow execution of other file extensions, but the ones listed above are the default executable extensions.

Windows – Get Windows to treat files with the same extension differently

Windows does not launch files based on any information in the file - building a database for that would take an incredible amount of work and programming. The only true way to identify a file is by the binary signatures in the file, if the file even has it, and this is up to the software author to implement.

In Windows, files are passed to the program you specify for a particular file extension. Windows determines a file's extension as the substring which follows the last occurrence of a period, so it's not possible with the file names you posted.

You have to either re-name the files (and give them unique file extensions), or write a batch file to launch the appropriate application for you. For more details, see this Technet article.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Executable File Extensions on Windows

Windows – Get Windows to treat files with the same extension differently

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