{"id":111779,"date":"2025-11-10T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=111779"},"modified":"2025-11-10T06:21:29","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T14:21:29","slug":"20251110-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20251110-00\/?p=111779","title":{"rendered":"How did Windows 3.1 distinguish two different programs that happened to share the same executable name?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some time ago, I described the purpose of the icons in the moricons.dll<\/tt> and progman.exe<\/tt> icon libraries<\/a>, along with a list of which programs Windows automatically associated the icons with. (moricons.dll<\/tt>, <\/a> progman.exe<\/tt><\/a>). <\/a><\/p>\n

One common problem is that multiple programs share the same executable name, so if you find an executable named MAIL.EXE<\/tt>, you aren’t sure whether that’s PATHWORKS Mail or cc:Mail or XcelleNet X\/Mail.<\/p>\n

What did Windows 3.1 do when it saw these ambiguous files?<\/p>\n

It simply asked the user for help.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
Setup Applications<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\n
Setup needs to know the application name for:<\/div>\n
C:\\MAIL\\MAIL.EXE<\/div>\n
S<\/u>elect the application name from the following list, and choose
\nOK, or press ENTER to continue.<\/div>\n
\n
Microsoft Mail<\/div>\n
PATHWORKS Mail for MS-DOS<\/div>\n
cc:Mail for MS-DOS<\/div>\n
XcelleNet X\/Mail for MS-DOS<\/div>\n
None of the above<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
OK<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
Cancel<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
H<\/u>elp<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The information for this came from the APPS.INF<\/tt> file, the format of which is documented in the Windows Resource Kit. (It starts on page 121<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Next time, we’ll see how Windows 95 improved on this in its application compatibility database.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The trouble with disambiguation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-111779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

The trouble with disambiguation.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}