Windows 7: Something very unusual & strange...

When I was renaming folders in Windows 7 today i managed to come upon what I believe to be a small bug. I wanted to have a dot "." after the name in a folder, but when i wrote in the dot to the end of the name it (the dot) just disapeared...
When I Couldn't do that I instead tried if it worked to have a dot at the end of the folder name if i added a blank after ". " ... the result was suprising, when I added the ". " at the end of the folder name the folder dissapeared.... only to return when i went to another folder and back again

Now, could someone with a little more expertise please tell me how and why this works in that way..?

Thanks in advance

I haven't come across that before

do you also have that problem if you try renaming a folder..?
could you perhaps check just to se if it's just my computer or if it's a common problem for all windows users.?

Just try renaming a folder and add the suffix ". " = a dot and a blank ...

would be glad to se if it does the same for you :O

thanks

Folder names can't have certain characters such as "" <> | etc.. which if you try it will give you a bubble tip saying so. As for a dot/period at the end, don't know but I do know you could name a folder New.Folder and it would work.

This is the explanation from Microsoft.....

WINDOWS CONVENTIONS

Windows has a maximum PATH length of 260 characters, so that includes
the drive letter (+ colon and backslash) folder and sub-folder names and
back-slashes.

Under Windows using the NTFS file system file and folder names may be up
to 256 characters long.

The following characters are invalid as file or folder names on Windows
using NTFS:
/ ? < > \ : * | " and any character you can type with the Ctrl key.
In addition to the above illegal characters the caret ^ is also not
permitted under Windows Operating Systems using the FAT file system.

In addition to these characters, the following conventions are also illegal:
Placing a space at the end of the name
Placing a period at the end of the name

The following file names are also reserved under Windows:
com1, com2, com3, com4, com5, com6, com7, com8, com9, lpt1, lpt2,
lpt3, lpt4, lpt5, lpt6, lpt7, lpt8, lpt9, con, nul, and prn

Very strange... Never seen it before...

Hi fluff, can you post a link to that explanation

Hello Fluff... yes it says that i can't put a space or a dot after a filename, but nothing at all about a folder temporarily going missing if a dot followed by a space is put at end of a folders name...

You didn't find any reason for this... or explenation..?

It's not really important, but i just like to know why and how things work on a cumputer based system.

thanks for the other answer though... actually learnt something new by it

Cheers

Right click > Undo option will also bring it back for whatever that is worth,lol. I can confirm what you are saying happens. Have you done any extensive searching on the subject? Did you try viewing system/hidden files to see if the awol folder re-appeared?

hI ult1mat, sorry I havn't got a link as I copied it out of a windows systems engineer manual I have from when I did the microsoft exam. Quite a lot of the rules date back to the old days of DOS (disc operating system) on which older versions of windows used to run on top of.
I understand both apple osx & linux operating systems also have their own "conventions"
The folder is probably going missing temporarily due to an illegal operating instruction & windows tries to auto correct it.
Hope this helps a bit.