[thelist] OT - folder named con cannot be created on Windows OS

Andrew Clover and-evolt at doxdesk.com
Thu Oct 13 05:41:05 CDT 2005


VOLKAN ÖZÇELİK <volkan ozcelik at gmail.com> wrote:

> An Indian discovered that nobody can create a FOLDER anywhere named as "con".
> This is something pretty cool...and unbelievable... At Microsoft the
> whole Team, including Bill Gates, couldn't answer why this happened!

Dunno about that - it's actually quite a well-known glitch in the 
security world, as the situation used to be quite a lot worse: even just 
trying to access a filesystem object called 'con' could cause Windows to 
hang up, which caused no end of fun.

Of course it beggars belief they *still* haven't fixed it in the latest 
OS, but there's backwards compatibility for you I guess.

In general under Windows you can't rely on being able to name a 
filesystem object any arbitrary string containing valid characters - 
things like leading and trailing spaces and cause problems, as well as 
the reserved words. For this reason, webapps should never attempt to use 
even validated submission data as the basis for filenames.

-- 
And Clover
mailto:and at doxdesk.com
http://www.doxdesk.com/

-- 
And Clover
mailto:and at doxdesk.com
http://www.doxdesk.com/


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