Alice AverlongšŸ³ļøā€āš§ļø1d ago

anyone tried opening the magic file "con" from MS DOS Edit?

I was hoping for an editor but it turns out instead it happily opens it but then hangs forever

Show threadAlice AverlongšŸ³ļøā€āš§ļø1d ago

weird punnet square of results:

EDIT hangs if you open "CON", but errors if you try "C:\CON\CON"
Win95 errors if you try to open "CON", but crashes if you try "C:\CON\CON"

Show threadsabik1d ago
@foone
How about if C:\CON\CON exists?
Show threadAlice AverlongšŸ³ļøā€āš§ļø1d ago

@sabik it can't exist, you can't create a folder named "CON".

like, to this day. I just tried on windows 11, it told me no

Show threadbhtooefr
@foone @sabik what about if itā€™s made through WSL? (thereā€™s a few other ways to make illegal filenames on NT, too, IIRC, but WSL - at least WSL1, not sure about 2 - is the easiest)
Mar 23 at 3:54amWeb
Show threadbhtooefr1d ago

@foone @sabik alright I tried it myself

Notepad++ canā€™t open the resulting file, but interestingly, Microsoftā€™s own Notepad CAN?!?

PowerShell and cmd think none of this exists, of course (they can see it if you do a dir, but if you actually try to cd into it, it canā€™t find it)

Windows Explorer at least nowadays was able to delete it. I know Iā€™ve done some horrendous WSL-enabled abuse of illegal filenames in the past, and could only destroy the evidence using WSL itself. (I had a file named ā€œC:\ā€ on my filesystem. I just tried it now, and it looks like Microsoft avoids this specific problem by re-encoding those characters to different Unicode codepoints - Cļ€ŗļœ is what itā€™s represented as in Win32 programs, so itā€™s just shoving the : and \ characters up into the U+F0xx private use space.)