On 26 Apr 2008 at 22:45, Venkat Viswanathan wrote:

> <<<< Easy answer: It is a special "reserved name". Rick Glazier 
> 
> 
> From: "Venkat Viswanathan" >on a side note you can't name a folder (in win xp at least)as>"con" (without quotes ofcourse) you can try if you have the time >even MS don't seem to know why >>>>
> 
> this is interesting.... is it possible to know "by whom" and "for
> whom" it is reserved? 

  Yes.  Reserved by the developers of DOS -- in imitation of the earlier 
CP/M OS -- to refer to the keyboard and screen.  One of a set of such 
reservations including also PRN for the printer.  It made it easy to 
implement things like

  copy file.ext con:

to show a file on the (text mode) screen.

  That these had been implemented using reserved "file" names was widely 
published and discussed somewhere around 10 years or so ago.  It shouldn't 
be hard to find some of those discussions archived on the web.

  Certainly, using internal tricks to give a file one of these reserved 
names -- or rather, something that would LOOK like one on a directory 
listing, in order to frustrate attempts to delete it, was being used by 
malware developers before the turn of the millenium.

David Gillett

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