A file extension or filename extension is a suffix at the end of a filename. It is used to show the type of computer file. This tells the operating system what program can understand it. For example, MYWORDS.TXT is a plain text file and may be opened by a text editor. Filename extensions come after the name of the file, and many of them are three letters long.
Some examples of common file extensions are:
- TXT files are plain text files
- Picture files
- Audio files
- MP3 are music files in the MP3 format
- AAC are Advanced Audio Coding music files
- FLAC are Free Lossless Audio Codec
- ALAC are Apple Lossess Audio Codec
- WMA are Windows Media Audio sound files
- MPEG are motion picture encoded video files
- MKV are Mastroska Video Codec
- WMV are Windows Media Video files
- HTM or *HTML are Hyper Text Markup Language files such as web pages
- PHP are web server scripts which create web pages
- ODT are Open Document text files
- DOC are text documents in Microsoft Word format
- XLS are Microsoft Excel spreadsheet documents
- PPT are Microsoft PowerPoint presentation files
- EXE are Microsoft Windows executable program files
- DLL are Dynamic Link Libraries, a type of executable file, in MS Windows
- ZIP are Compressed files (Lempel Ziff algorithm in an archive)
- Z are Unix / Linux compressed files
- bz2 are bzip2 block compressed files (very good compression)
- jar are Java archive files
- JSP are Java server pages files
- java are Java source code files
- class are Java compiled source code files
- oc are Java run-time library files
- tar are Unix / Linux tape archive files
- sh are Unix / Linux shell script files
- awk are Unix C like pattern processing language source code files
- sed are Unix stream editor command files
- lex are Unix / Linux lexical analyzer C code generator specification files
- c are C programming language source files
- o are C programming language compiled (object) files
- cs are C# programming language files
- v are V programming language source files
- vsh are V programming language script files
- rb are Ruby programming language files
- pl are Perl or Prolog programming language files
There are many other commonly used file extensions.
In most operating systems, you can change the program defaults so that the computer knows which program to open each type of file extension with.
