There is an oft-abused program named rundll32.exe
. Why does its name end in 32
? Why not just call it rundll.exe
? (I will for the moment ignore the rude behavior of calling people stupid under the guise of asking a question.)
Because there needed to be a way to distinguish the 16-bit version from the 32-bit version.
Windows 95 had both rundll.exe
(the 16-bit version) and rundll32.exe
(the 32-bit version). Of course, with the gradual death of support for 16-bit Windows, the 16-bit rundll.exe
is now just a footnote in history, leaving just the 32-bit version.
But why did the two have to have different names? Why not just use the same name (rundll.exe
) for both, putting the 16-bit version in the 16-bit system directory and the 32-bit version in the 32-bit system directory?
Because Windows 95 didn’t have separate 16-bit and 32-bit system directories. There was just one system directory called SYSTEM
and everything hung out there, both 16-bit and 32-bit, like one big happy family.
Well, maybe not a happy family.
At any rate, when 64-bit Windows was introduced, the plan was not to do things the crazy mishmash way and instead separate the 32-bit files into one directory and the 64-bit files into a different directory. That way, no files needed to be renamed, and your batch file that ran rundll32.exe
with some goofy command line still worked, even on 64-bit Windows.
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