Save without suffix

This was one of the first things I hesitated with, starting out online.

There are two occasions these days where I have to create a text file, with no suffix, or a non-standard suffix:
i. Creating a .htaccess file for PHP applications
ii. Editing a host entry file, for DNS masking.

I can’t remember the first time I had to do this, but it did make me pause.

1. Open Notepad and create your content.
2. Select File, then Save As (instead of just save)
3. By default, Windows selects “Save as Type: ” to be “Text Document”.
However this is a pull-down list, so select “All files (*.*) instead of Text Document.
This will allow you to specify the exact filename that you want, instead of a file that looks like filename.txt.

If this still doesn’t work, check your firewalls and anti-virus programs. If you are writing to a system file, they may block the file saving, and give you a strange error message. Or say that they save it, but not really do it.

And if you are still having problems editing a file that doesn’t have a suffix, open Notepad by itself. Then drag the file you want to edit, into Notepad. Then use the process above, (File, Save As, All Files(*.*) to save the file. Apparently dragging a file into Notepad is the best way of ensuring that it doesn’t get changed into a .txt file.

Hope that helps.