How Shapefiles are Stored

Shapefiles are a simple, non-topological format for storing the geometric location and attribute information of geographic features. The shapefile format defines the geometry and attributes of geographically-referenced features in as many with specific file extensions that must be stored in the same project workspace.

A shapefile is really a directory of a number of files. Three files are required to define a shape, but there may be many more, depending on how much data is associated with the geographic objects.

They are:

Note that this information can also be obtained through ArcView Help.