Ever had a question about Linux but felt too afraid to ask? Well now’s your chance, ask any question about Linux, no matter how noob or repeated it is, and I and others will help answer them.
Previous noob question thread: https://lemmy.ml/post/14261893
I’m afraid this answer isn’t 100% correct. There are ways to find out a file’s type beyond looking at an extension. For example, there are lots of file formats where all of the files start with a specific sequence of bites, known as a file signature (or as “magic bytes” or “magic numbers”).
You can try the
filecommand line tool to check that you can find out a file’s format without resorting to its extension, and you can read the tool’s manpage to learn how it works.Yes, I know about them and always prove extremely useful every time I receive a file with a wrong/no extension and have little clue about its content. But since the question was about how OP could work with “files with extensions” produced in Windows, I wanted to help clarify what are they, why they are used and that files do not need to be converted or whatever to be opened in Linux as it can “work with them” just fine.