Re: con\con is a old thing (anyway is cool)

[dleblanc () MINDSPRING COM (David LeBlanc)]

At 10:29 AM 3/15/00 -0800, Oliver Friedrichs wrote:

> While we're on the issue of creating known devices under Windows.  An
> issue I remember noting awhile back is that under Windows NT, it's
> possible to create and remove most of these devices over a file
> share.  They aren't treated as special files.  You cannot however
> create or remove these files locally.  I imagine that this is due to
> the fact that there are descrepencies between file operations
> processed through the CIFS layer, and operations processed locally.
> While this probably isn't a serious issue, the main problem is that
> someone could create a large number of these files (as I recall you
> could use a large number of variations), and the local user would not
> be able to remove them, since they can only be removed via a network
> share.  More an annoyance than anything..

I'm too lazy to look it up this morning, but there is a knowledge base
article on this - you can get rid of them locally, you just use a port of
rm that runs in the POSIX subsystem - these are DOS devices, and the POSIX
subsystem knows nothing about them.  So rm ./con works nicely 8-)

BTW, a POSIX version of rm comes in the resource kit.

David LeBlanc
dleblanc () mindspring com