A tale of two file names

Users of DOS or older versions of Windows will have invariably stumbled upon a quirk of Windows' handling of file names at some point. File names which are longer than 8 characters, have an extension other than 3 character long, or aren't upper-case and alphanumeric, are (in some situations) truncated to an ugly shorter version which contains a tilde (~) in it somewhere. For example, 5+6 June Report.doc will be turned into 5_6JUN~1.DOC. This is relic of the limitations brought about by older versions of FAT used in DOS and older versions of pre-NT Windows.So far, nothing new. This article, however, delves deeper into a special aspect of this relic: a built-in checksum function that, up until now, was undocumented.