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


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?


Solution

  • 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?