Name a file or folder with a starting dot

So, in linux hidden folders and files begin with a dot. In windows, it was considered forbidden to create such files (at least I believed it so in FAT32), but now you can see a number of tools creating file system entries with that naming scheme (git, for instance). But, as a user, can I name anything like that?

Let's try to create a folder that is dot-starting:

Sexy naming

The result is not what we wanted:

Type a filename, it says. We just did, dummy!

Well, Windows think we didn't typed a name. That's scary, we did! Or, maybe not? For Windows, it seems, everything after the dot is considered an extension, so, in this case, we just provided an extension for the file (not a name).

To go around this issue, you have to make windows understand that ".dotstarted" is the name, not the extension. And what is the extension in this case, you may ask? The empty string, of course. So, the full name, with the extension, would be...

File with extensions

We just specified the empty string as the extension, making sure Windows understands the ".dotstarted" part as the name. This results on it being correctly created, be it a directory or a simple file.