Linux File Name Conventions

File Name Conventions Suggestions for All Operating Systems

STOP! Don’t Name That File Without First Watching This Video. - YouTube by DistroTube

Recommendations:

• Most important: be consistent for yourself
• Use all lower case as some operating systems like Windows are case insensitive for filenames
• Avoid spaces and replace spaces with hyphens or underscores. Hyphens are recommended for overall consistency to avoid clashes with timestamps
• No special characters, like underscores do not go well with viewing on web
• For dates in file names, use YYYY-MM-DD format or YYYYMMDD format, obtain in CLI using

# Get date format
date -I

# Store to variable
date=$(date -I)

# Create file
touch file-name-$date
# file will be created like: file-name-2019-01-01