When I used Windows, I remember you couldn't create folders named "con", for compatibility reasons.
It kind of sucked because it means "with" in Italian, and I often could have organized files within "with"/"without"subfolders.
It kind of sucked because it means "with" in Italian, and I often could have organized files within "with"/"without"subfolders.
"Do not use the following reserved names for the name of a file: CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, and LPT9." [0]
[0] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...
So when a Unix user checks in a file named "aux.c" to your project, it will cause problems for Windows users.
For compatibility with DOS 1.x no less [0]! That's 37 years and counting of backward compatibility...
[0] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031022-00/?p=...
When they were added Microsoft could have chosen to put special devices in their own directory (eg C:\dev on each device, or reserved D: for devices, or any number of other schemes). Instead they decided to make these special device names be implicit members of every directory on every drive.
Similar to make treating whitespace as significant, the decision to be compatible with the relatively few existing users doomed many, many more users in the future to endless problems. Backwards compatibility has a non-zero cost to users too!
Random example: Here are SuperUser answers written this year, only a few months ago, employing this idiom.
That doesn't convince me they actually thought this through at the time.
See: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...
An old DOS trick to create a file is to run "copy con newfile.txt" and hit enter. Then you can start typing the file's contents. I don't recommend trying to use backspace or delete since it doesn't always work like you think, depending on your shell. When you're done, hit F6 or Ctrl+Z followed Enter. It still works in cmd.exe.
Similarly, you can create an empty file with "copy nul newfile.txt" or test copy a file with "copy filename.txt nul".
http://sasheldon.com/blog/2017/05/07/how-i-broke-cargo-for-w...