What is the file extension for dot file?

The above page says .gv is the file extension for a DOT file. But since the language name is DOT, shouldn’t the extension be called .dot? Thanks.

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It used to be .dot, but Microsoft Word claimed .dot, whoops. The Graphviz programs don’t care.

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.gv is the IANA registered extension.

I don’t think there is anything in graphviz that actually cares about the extension, or even if there is one at all.

My interpretation of the problem is that DOT is a data-definition-language and not a display format. So knowing that it is a DOT file doesn’t actually tell you how to process it.

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Graphviz also was developed in the Unix environment, where files just contain data that can be processed by any tool as part of a pipeline, whether the tool is neato, gvpr, wc or cat.

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