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JaggedMetalOs t1_ixtza8l wrote

Reply to comment by Fat_IRL in ELI5: In recent years, new formats like webp and jfif have started popping up. However, if I rename them to gif or jpeg, they still work. How can it be that renaming the extension doesn't ruin the image format? Why do they even exist then? by Luthemplaer

> File extensions don't actually matter, they're for humans, not computers. More or less.

Well, I wouldn't say that. They are used (in Windows) to decide what icon to use and what program to open it with when you double click.

Technically Windows could look inside every file to decide this, but that would be much slower when listing files in a folder.

Also while most applications will check the contents of a file while opening it, some assume a format based on the file extension (eg. LibreOffice will always open .csv as a text csv file, even if the file is actually an xls/ods)

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Fat_IRL t1_ixu5fba wrote

Yeah you right with all of that, especially the last, I was kinda being generic with my response.

It just kinda freaks me out when I'm on my Linux laptop and it'll save my file 'fartbutt' as a file with no extension at allunless I tell it to, and it's still valid.

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