File name and type standards

All files you create will have a names which must conform to the following standards and guidelines.

The following are mandatory standards:

• There should be no whitespace in the file name.

• If the file is of a commonly used type, e.g. a LaTeX source file, a PDF file, an HTML file, etc., then the filename should have an extension to indicate the type, e.g. .pdf for PDF files, etc. (The list of commonly used file types and their filename extensions are available in many MIME type catalogues, including /etc/mime.types on most Unix systems.) It is important there should be one and only one period character separating the prefix from the extension. In other words, a file name like zodiac setup....xls is not acceptable.

  Extensions do not need to be limited to three characters; that limit is a hangover from the MS-DOS file system. HTML files should have the extension .html and not .htm.

• If the file is an executable (binary or script), it should not have a filename extension. In other words, the installer script for Merce should not be called install.sh. It may be called install or, to distinguish it with the standard BSD Unix utility of the same name, merce-install.

• Certain special file types can have a string of extensions in the filenames. The commonest example of this is a file of a particular base type later compressed using a compression algorithm. For instance, a tarfile may be compressed by the bzip2 algorithm. In such cases, the filename should have two extensions, e.g. something.tar.gz. Multiple extensions are also needed for special Unix files like y.tab.c or y.tab.h. In all other cases, a file should have only zero or one extension.

• Filenames must not have underscores unless it is unavoidable. When multiple words are concatenated to form the name, they should be joined together with hyphens. Therefore zodiac-setup.xls is acceptable, zodiac_setup.xls is not.

• Filenames must not have special characters or unprintable characters, e.g. the carriage-return or linefeed character.

• Filenames must not have any character which is considered a special character or symbol by the Unix shell. This includes all possible parentheses, brackets, the <, & and > symbols, the asterisk, pipe, exclamation mark, caret, hash, percentage symbols.

  On MS Windows systems, it is common to see filenames like

  July financials 26.07.2006 (Revised).xls

  but will not be acceptable at Merce.

• Filenames must never start with a hyphen.

• Files created with OpenOffice should be saved as MS Office files, e.g. .doc and .xls files, unless you are 100% sure that these files will never be given to anyone outside Starcom. Some confidential internal documents are the only ones about which we can be sure. So, to be on the safe side, configure your OpenOffice to save new files in the MS Office formats by default.

• If you need to create a document in OpenOffice or MS Office to send to outsiders, then please save as PDF or convert to PDF by any other means before sending to outsiders. The only times when you will send .doc or .xls files to outsiders are

  • when you are sure that he needs to edit the file and send it back to you, OR
  • (in the case of spreadsheets only) when you feel he may need to change the magnification, font size, formatting, etc. before he views or prints the document.

  In all other cases, ensure that you convert to PDF before sending the document to the outside party.

• The filenaming conventions for specific programming environments may have standards different from those here, e.g. Java class filenames or Perl module names. In such cases, those standards should be followed in preference to our corporate standards where there is a conflict.

The above rules can be broken if there is an external unavoidable requirement, e.g. when an externally supplied program requires us to provide a file with a specific filename which does not conform to our standards here.

The recommended guidelines, which are not mandatory standards, are:

• Filenames must not have upper case letters as far as possible. The only exception to this may be the case when an abbreviation is part of the name, e.g. metroorder-rollout-AP.pdf where AP stands for Action Plan.

• Text files should have the extension .txt. This is specially important if sending the file as an attachment over email, since most mail clients use the filename extension to apply the MIME type for the attachment.

• You should not have filenames ending with the tilde character (~) since some editors, including Emacs, use this extension for backup copies of edited files.