Saturday, 31 December 2011
Details On The CON Issue In Windows
We can not create a folder with its name as "Con" in windows and many people are unaware of this fact and the reason behind this. So I am here to clarify everything about the CON issue in windows. I will also discuss about the way to create such folders in windows.
If you haven't tried yet, try creating the folder with the name con and you will find that the folder can not be renamed to con. This is not the only name that shows such unique behavior. Other such names that can not be the name of folders are CON, PRN, AUX, CLOCK$, NUL, COM0, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, LPT0, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, and LPT9(list taken from Wikipedia).
These words are the reserved words and date back to old MS-DOS days. These names were reserved for MS-DOS device files and hence to prevent any kind of ambiguity, these names are not allowed for normal files and folders.
But there's way. Now comes the role of Universal Naming Convention(or Uniform Naming Convention) commonly known as UNC which specifies a common syntax to describe the location of a network resource, such as a shared file, directory, or printer.
The UNC syntax for windows system is as below:
You can read about UNC in the wikipedia entry.
UNC was introduced after the introduction of MS-DOS so MS-DOS systems do not understand the UNC naming i.e. it is not backward compatible to MS-DOS. That said, we can create folders with special names in our local system using the UNC syntax. The single dot (.) is used to indicate the local system as per the UNC definition.
Now to create a folder with any of the reserved words, we will use mkdir command. For example, to create a CON folder in my friend's laptop's Desktop folder, I typed the following command in the command prompt.
This creates a con folder in our desktop. Now try to delete it using GUI or from command prompt by issuing rmdir con command. It will give you an error. So to delete the folder, you can use the same UNC syntax as below:
On issuing this command, your con folder should be gone. You can try the same with the other reserved file names. Also, check the following screenshots for clarity.
Some of you might think Whats the use of all this stuff?: I don't know if there's any serious use of this stuff but its kinda cool to know these kind of stuffs for tech-freaks. If there can be any good use of this trick, please share over here. I hope this stuff is useful. Happy New Year 2012 :)
If you haven't tried yet, try creating the folder with the name con and you will find that the folder can not be renamed to con. This is not the only name that shows such unique behavior. Other such names that can not be the name of folders are CON, PRN, AUX, CLOCK$, NUL, COM0, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, LPT0, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, and LPT9(list taken from Wikipedia).
These words are the reserved words and date back to old MS-DOS days. These names were reserved for MS-DOS device files and hence to prevent any kind of ambiguity, these names are not allowed for normal files and folders.
But there's way. Now comes the role of Universal Naming Convention(or Uniform Naming Convention) commonly known as UNC which specifies a common syntax to describe the location of a network resource, such as a shared file, directory, or printer.
The UNC syntax for windows system is as below:
\\ComputerName\SharedFolder\Resource
You can read about UNC in the wikipedia entry.
UNC was introduced after the introduction of MS-DOS so MS-DOS systems do not understand the UNC naming i.e. it is not backward compatible to MS-DOS. That said, we can create folders with special names in our local system using the UNC syntax. The single dot (.) is used to indicate the local system as per the UNC definition.
Now to create a folder with any of the reserved words, we will use mkdir command. For example, to create a CON folder in my friend's laptop's Desktop folder, I typed the following command in the command prompt.
mkdir \\.\C:\Users\suman\Desktop\con
This creates a con folder in our desktop. Now try to delete it using GUI or from command prompt by issuing rmdir con command. It will give you an error. So to delete the folder, you can use the same UNC syntax as below:
rmdir \\.\C:\Users\suman\Desktop\con
On issuing this command, your con folder should be gone. You can try the same with the other reserved file names. Also, check the following screenshots for clarity.
Some of you might think Whats the use of all this stuff?: I don't know if there's any serious use of this stuff but its kinda cool to know these kind of stuffs for tech-freaks. If there can be any good use of this trick, please share over here. I hope this stuff is useful. Happy New Year 2012 :)
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