"Dave" <dav### [at] davedelongcom> wrote:
> Not necessarily.  #1 could be #1.pov if you've chosen to hide file
> extensions in the Finder.  On Mac OS X, there are two names for a file:
> One is the display name (what you see in the Finder), and one is the actual
> name.  The actual name contains the full name, including the extension.  If
> you have your Finder set up to hide file extensions, then the display name
> would only be "#1" even though the full name is "#1.pov".  Likewise, you
> could have a "#1.jpg" that would ALSO show up as "#1", and so on and so on.
>  I was speculating that perhaps POVRay was only getting the display name
> (since I have extensions turned off).

Started in newusers, this part of the discussion probably belongs in
povray.macintosh...

I have the "Show all file extensions" checkbox unchecked on my Finder
preferences too, and yet many of my files show their extension. Get Info on
the individual files shows yet another checkbox option to "Hide extension"
that apparenty overrides the Finder checkbox.

From what I can tell if I manually type in the extension when I create a
file (be it .pov or .jpg, etc) the Finder assumes I want to see the
extension. However some files don't have an extension at all, even
hidden, and yet OS X knows what kind of application they belong to.
These appear to be Classic applications, so maybe it's there for
backward compatibility?

I've had trouble when I email a Word document to a PC user without
the .doc extension, they often replied they couldn't open the document
(although they could if they used the open file menu), so I know to add
the .doc when I send them. It's probably the same when sending
POV-Ray files to people on other systems.

I guess for me the bottom line is I still like having the extensions
hidden for the most part, but for certain files I prefer seeing the
extensions. For instance, I like knowing an image file is a .jpg since
that means it has some quality loss and is probably an email-able size.
And for POV-Ray it's handy to keep from trying to render .inc files
by accident, which I remember doing too many times :-).

Sorry to be so wordy but it's something I've used quite a bit but not
given any thought until now.

Mark

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