README
Software information file / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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For the 2011 novel, see Reamde. For the 2022 memoir, see README.txt.
In software development, a README file contains information about the other files in a directory or archive of computer software. A form of documentation, it is usually a simple plain text file called README
, Read Me
, READ.ME
, README.TXT
,[1] README.md
(to indicate the use of Markdown), or README.1ST
.[2]
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The file's name is generally written in uppercase. On Unix-like systems in particular, this causes it to stand out ā both because lowercase filenames are more common, and because the ls
command commonly sorts and displays files in ASCII-code order, in which uppercase filenames will appear first.[nb 1]