said by Mele20:So File Explorer in Windows 8 is just an "explorer" not a "viewer"? What's the difference?
It's a matter of
what it shows you, so the question is around the 'file' part, not the 'viewer' part.
People get fooled into the viewpoint that each thing that shows up in Windows Explorer is a thing that exists in the file system. This is reasonably accurate most of the time, but it's never been 100%, and it tends to get less true as fancier features are added.
An easy example is that it looks like you have one thing called "Recycle Bin" than contains files you have deleted, and they're still named like they were when you deleted them. In fact, there's a related directory on every single disk, it's called $Recycle.Bin on Windows 7 but its name has changed a lot. $Recycle.Bin contains a bunch of subdirectories named for user ids, and each such subdir contains files with cryptic names - these are the 'deleted' files. It all looks nothing like the Explorer view.
That example says there's some sort of correlation between the file system view and the Explorer view, but that doesn't have to always be true. Explorer can, if it chooses, show things that are entirely virtual.
In the context of the current discussion, even if Explorer is displaying a fairly simple file or folder, it can give it a different name from what it's known by in the file system. I think this was originally added for per-user localization of directory names (like 'Program Files').
The 'dir' command in the command prompt won't lie to you.