Program Files

Program Files is a folder in Microsoft Windows operating systems where applications that are not part of the operating system are installed by default. Each program is put into its own subfolder where all of the related binary files can be stored. The name of this sub-folder can be chosen by the user, though installers will often give a default directory name based on the name of the company that created it and the application itself.

On an unchanged US-English Windows installation this directory will be at C:\Program Files, though it can be moved; on non-US-English systems the folder name may be different. In order to keep track of where it is, there is an environment variable ProgramFiles that stores its location which is loaded from the registry value HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ProgramFilesDir when the computer boots.

There is some criticism in the choice of name, in that to be backwards compatible with the 8.3 limit of the old File Allocation Table, the name of this folder must be truncated, normally to Progra~1. In addition to this, ports of programs that were written under operating systems that generally do not have a space in the path have difficulty in running when installed there. ^{[citation needed]}

On 64-bit versions of Windows, there are two folders for application files; the "Program Files" folder contains 64-bit programs, and the "Program Files (x86)" folder contains 32-bit programs. On Windows NT-based operating systems (NT4, 2000, XP, Vista, etc.), the Program Files folders are protected, meaning that only Administrators can change their contents; while this is a more secure solution, it means that programs which were accustomed to running as administrator and creating logs or other files in the folder containing the application cannot do so when the user is not an administrator, which is increasingly common.

Some application installers reject spaces within the install path location. For 32-bit systems, the short name for the Program Files folder is Progra~1. For 64-bit systems, the short name for the 64-bit Program Files folder is Progra~1 (same as on 32-bit systems); while the short name for the 32-bit Program Files (x86) folder is now Progra~2.