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by pehtis 1877 days ago
Yes it cares. If you rename a folder to folder.app then it will change to look and "behave" like an app. Or if you change the extension of a video file to mp3 you'll loose the icon preview.

Finder does try to help with renaming and when you try to rename a file only the filename is selected and not the extension.

1 comments

What you're describing is just Finder caring. Linux doesn't care at all about your file extensions but Nautilus sure does.

In GNOME for example gio handles opening files in the "correct" application by way of the MIME database in /usr/share/application/mimeapps.list and ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list.

LaunchServices definitely cares about extensions. The Mac OS has a strange history with extensions (classic Macs didn't really support them, but they were still a common convention), but file extensions are more than a browser-level construct.