[0xDEAD10CC]

Recently, I found out that it's possible to change the extension of any compressed folder (.zip, .rar, even .exe) to .txt or your choice of text file to make it unusable, then change it back when needed to use it.

My challenge is to find a way to do this automatically, using minimal user input. I tired it yesterday and failed pretty hard so good luck to anyone who tries.

I'm confused. Changing the file extension does not make it unusable, it just changes the default program used to open the file; on windows, default programs for the "open" verb for instance depend on the default program assigned to a file extension. Other than that, I can load an executable with a .txt or .jpeg file extension into memory no problem, because the file bytes will never change just by changing the file extension. What point are you trying to get across here?

By automatic, I mean after the file name is inputted, the written program would go through the process of changing the extension without any manual intervention

So parsing the file signature and determining the original filetype by that, and renaming the file to it's proper extension automatically? It's as simple as that.

"MZ" - .exe
"PK" - .zip
etc...

Otherwise I don't understand... It's easy to just call the rename() function and change the filename + extension to anything at random.