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Comment by koyote | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, I don't know. This is nearly 20 years ago now.

I assume the FTP server created the directories using a different file-system API call than Windows Explorer.

Here's a post by someone who found one of these directory structures on his FTP server back in 2003: http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=31278

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My guess is that there's 2 APIs to access files, a user mode API and a kernel mode API, and this special casing is only available in the user mode one. If the FTP server uses the kernel API it bypasses the special case file handling.

The guy forgot to try to log into the ftp server itself to delete the files. After all, if the ftpd program used the correct APIs to create the directories and files, it would probably also use the right ones to delete them.

Judging by how the article was written, that probably wouldn't have helped him. You couldn't delete these directories directly, but rather had to delete the nested "unnamed" directory: “/path/to/COM1/ /“, which is also how you would create the directories in the first place. Usually, the tag-directory would also go along with a list of directories explaining that you should not create "undeletable" directories on NT-based servers, as that would annoy the admin and might cause them to remove anonymous access. You were only supposed to create large mazes of directories to prevent other random anonymous users from finding and deleting your files.

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