Copyright Goodheart-Willcox Co., Inc. Chapter 4 File Management 137 All fi les and folders should have unique names. Although most operating systems will allow you to create many fi les with the same name as long as they are in different folders or drives, this is not a good idea. When looking for a specifi c fi le and several appear, the user will not know which one is correct. Meaningful Names The fi le name should clearly describe what is in the fi le. For example, suppose a student uses LabReport to name a biology project. This may be satisfactory if there is only one lab report. However, if another lab report is created later, it would not be clear which fi le is for which report. Instead, more descriptive fi le names such as LabReportBio and LabReportDNA better describe the content of the fi les. A naming convention is a pattern that is followed whenever a fi le name is created. Without spaces between words, long fi le names can be hard to read. For example, the name reportforlabexperiment is diffi cult to read. This name would be easy to read if there was an indication of the individual words. CamelCase is a naming convention in which the beginning of each word in the name is capitalized. This allows the fi le name to be read easily. For example, the name reportforlabexperiment becomes ReportForLabExperiment in CamelCase. The CamelCase naming convention got its name due to the apparent humps the capital letters make in the name, as shown in Figure 4-4. Goodheart-Willcox Publisher Figure 4-3. Reserved symbols cannot be used in file or folder names. Symbol Description Less than symbol or left chevron Greater than symbol or right chevron : Colon “ Double quote / Forward slash \ Backslash | Vertical bar or pipe ? Question mark * Asterisk PhotoCar Goodheart-Willcox Publisher Teguh Mujiono/Shutterstock.com Figure 4-4. CamelCase is using a capital letter for the first letter in each word in a file name.