Some important facts about file names | WHG training resources
Description: It is worth remembering that:

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# Some important facts about file names

It is worth remembering that:

- File names in Linux, just like command and option names, are case sensitive. The names `File.txt` and `file.txt` refer to different files.

- File names beginning with a period (“.”) character are 'hidden', so if you type `ls` you won’t see them unless you also use the option `-a`. Some applications usually place their configuration/settings files in your home directory as hidden files (if you try `ls -a ~` you may see there are quite a lot of them.)

- Linux supports file names containing white spaces and punctuation characters, so you might be tempting to start writing `Long, Complicated Filename That Look Like This!!!`. However, these filenames are often hard to interact with in other commands later, so for bioinformatics work it is generally best to restrict to a few characters - letters, numbers, the period (“.”), dash (“-”), and underscore (“_”) are generally good - and to try to avoid using spaces. You will thank yourself later for this!

- You should probably avoid using bash command names as filenames: although possible, this might mess up your commands!

## Next steps

Next we will learn more about working with files.