To understand why we have to go to great lengths sometimes to find out simply what a post contains is essential. This is a time of bots: scripts that companies use to monitor what is being posted in the newsgroups. Most posters would rather stay out of the eyes that these bots have and so they disguise themselves. These bots are searching for names of programs or media that it wants to find out if they are being posted. The easiest way at first to continue to communicate what is being offered in the subject line of the post while avoiding these bots was to transform obvious letters into other characters or interrupt words so that the bot couldn't match the expression. Examples would be: C4ll 0f D00ty or st.ar wa.rs. Over time, posters went through a series of periods of having to user more clever disguises that made conveying what the post actually was rather difficult. Today, posts vary from being very easy to determine what they are to very difficult. To better explain the latest system for determining what a post is, it is necessary to first have a little section explaining a new requesting system for the binaries.

Be careful with these files, as there are AT LEAST two major formats that use this naming system. One we covered already, WinRAR. Some people prefer to set up their rar archives to be named as .001, .002, etc. If you try to open the .001 extension in WinRAR and it doesn't work, you have yourself an Split archive which you should use HJSplit for (http://www.freebyte.com/hjsplit/.

Special thanks to johngalt who contributed this:

{filename}.ISO.001
{filename}.ISO.002
...
{filename}.ISO.xyz.


The fact that it has the file type right there to me suggests that a different utility was used to create the files - they are not archived and split, they are just split directly - in other words, someone used a file splitting utility (My personal favorite is HJSplit Pro) to split {filename}.ISO into these smaller parts to post to the NGs.

HJSplit contains routines to both split *and* join split files - and is pretty automatic - just navigate to the folder where the files are, it will list all the .001 files, and click on it, click start, and away you go.

Finally, for the RAR'd files with .001 to ... .xyz extensions you can set up WinRAR to be the application that opens with them as well, but you have to be *extremely* careful in that you don't try to extract a non WinRAR compatible file that was split with HJSplit, and vice versa.

The key is the filename -0 split files have 3 part file name - {filename}, original extension (in your case ISO) and finally the enumerated extension.

If the files were created with WinRAR, they can be extracted by opening winrar and browsing to and selecting the .001 file and using the "extract" menu selection. You will have to select a destination folder for the extracted file.