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Interesting Discovery, a new reserved word

An Indian discovered that nobody can create a folder or file anywhere named as "con" This is something pretty unbelievable. At Microsoft the whole Team, including Bill Gates, couldn't answer why this happened! Try it out yourself !

Try it out…

Published Friday, October 14, 2005 2:54 PM by kitkai

Filed under: Tech Stuff

Comments

# re: Interesting Discovery, a new reserved word@ Friday, October 14, 2005 3:31 PM

The following reserved device names cannot be used as the name of a file:

CON, PRN, AUX, CLOCK$, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, and LPT9.

You must avoid using these names as a file name suffix or file name body, so you have to avoid names such as aux.c, file.aux or NUL.txt.

But I still dun understand why is CON reserved.

by eforce

# re: Interesting Discovery, a new reserved word@ Friday, October 14, 2005 6:24 PM

Weird, Bill should know better, seeing that he was more involved with DOS.

And it should not be allowed, because "copy t.txt con" should display the text file, and "copy con t.txt" should copy console input to the text file.

by hannes

# re: Interesting Discovery, a new reserved word@ Saturday, October 15, 2005 10:10 AM

"con" is reserved for the console input.
http://blogs.msdn.com/adioltean/archive/2005/02/25/380759.aspx

There was a famous bug in Windows 9x where you did something like "copy con con" (cannnot remember the exact command line) it will blue screen on you.

by icelava