Why are most downloaded files have such weird nonsence names like 2a0000016009f479?

Question

Why are most downloaded files have such weird nonsence names like 2a0000016009f479?

In: 2

Answer 1

This is a hash (e.g. sha1, sha256, sha512 or whatever are “hashing-algorithms”, that can be used to generate (in an ideal world) unique hashes for each file.

It’s used, if you have a filename and the hash stored in a database and the actual file is on some file-system, instead of bloating up the database.

Also, you’d overwrite a file, that has the exact same content (and thus the same hash), instead of storing it multiple times with different names.

etc .. There are multiple reasons, why you micht wanna do that.