Something you can't do with Microsoft Windows

[nahmus]

Now I even impressed myself. I need to stay out late more often! oh damn.. I guess this pretty much proves that I'm a geek huh? No gettin outta this one.

If i remember correctly CON is reserved for the "console' device. I believe this is a holdout from the cardreader/keypunch and serial console days. Its late and I've not slept yet but i believe thats correct

*UPDATE
Mystery solved, you can stop emailing now.

Reader Mathias Schwarz offers this explanation:

It's not that weird. 'con' is a reserved word from the old DOS days, simply meaning 'console'. If you wanted to create a new text file in DOS you could type 'copy con newfile.txt' meaning copy from the console to newfile.txt. This would let you type some lines and when you ended the file with ^Z (DOSish for 'end of file') you would have a file called newfile.txt containing whatever you wrote in the console. This is indeed still possible in the Windows XP console, and can you see what mess it would cause if you let files or folders have the name 'con'? What would 'copy con newfile.txt' then mean? BSOD?

Russ Watts confirms the suggestion, giving this list of other DOS devices that can't be used as folder names:
CON, PRN, AUX, CLOCK$, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, and LPT9.

 

[KfistoRok]

Lol I just played this joke on IM..

There's a new virus going around. You have it if you can't create a folder named con.

Don't turn off your pc or you will lose your hard drive...

Then sign off for a few minutes..

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

This is how people made locked dirctories on annoymous FTP's - back in the days you would find an anonymous FTP and make locked directories even the system admin could not delete using COM or /[space][space]~[space]COM[space][space][space]/

and such, was a catchy exploit and worked well.

 

[4GHZ_or_bust]

Useless trick: in DOS enter this: type con > lpt1 and you have a $2,000 typewriter.

Have anyone tried using a non Windows OS to create a taboo directory name (ie Pocket PC, Linux, even Macintosh), then tried to mount the drive with the taboo directory on Windows? I just tried that via my PPC2k2 on my CF card. It worked but here's where it gets REALLY odd. If you try to rename the taboo name to something else that is valid, you get an error message: Cannot rename con: Cannot find the specified file. Make sure you specify the correct path and file name."

 

[JigPu]

I just did it.

And now I can't UN-do it

No, I didn't photoshop this (not that I'm good enough if I wanted to). It really exists, and it's really sitting there not letting me delete it (even with DOS).


Should you permanantly want a "con" folder on your disk, here's how I did it:
Right click on a ZIP file in Windows. Choose "Extract All..." and click "Next". For the path, enter "c:\con" (I can't remember if I had a trailing backslash or not, but it probably dosen't matter). Extract the ZIP file, and you now have a folder with that for all purposes is read-only. The ZIP file I used has a 44KB file in it (regardless of the fact that Windows is reporting 0 bytes), so it's not exactly eating diskspace, but it's still kinda annoying to not be able to delete it...


EDIT: W00T! OK, for those who do this, I managed to figure out how to delete the folder as well (thank goodness). First, you need to delete all the files within the folder. DOS won't let you cd to the directory, so you'll need to use Windows. Next, open up the command prompt and type in rmdir "c:\con\" (yes, you need quotes and the absolute path). It should go away without any fuss.

Freaky stuff...

JigPu

 

[threeme2189]

pretty cool. but useless

 

[n17ikh]

i went and made a folder called con on my gentoo server

then i tried viewing it on my windows machine this is what it shows (i can't believe i dont have anything better to do )

Interesting. Mine doesn't do that when I create a folder on the mounted Redhat drive - it shows it as being con, aux, whatever. but the interesting part is I can't make the folder called con or aux from inside windows on the network drive but from SSH I can mkdir con and then it subsequently shows up and works just fine inside windows.
I can surf around inside the con folder but I can't delete it, Windows gives me a file not found error. Fun!