Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️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
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"
sabik@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
curtmack@foone @sabik the names are reserved by the Win32 API, but NTFS doesn't care, so it's possible to create the files by using \\?\ to specify the file I/O namespace, sending the filename directly to the filesystem.
This then causes grief for users because they can't delete the file or do anything with it. (Cygwin used to be the recommended way to fix this, but WSL works too. I think you can also use \\?\ in Terminal but who wants to learn Win32 namespaces just to delete a file)