---- Eli Zaretskii <e...@gnu.org> wrote: > > From: David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> > > Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2014 17:56:46 +0200 > > > > Eli Zaretskii <e...@gnu.org> writes: > > > > >> Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2014 10:05:52 +0100 > > >> From: Neil Jerram <n...@ossau.homelinux.net> > > >> > > >> On 2014-06-09 20:32, l...@gnu.org wrote: > > >> > What’s the name of /dev/null on Windows? > > >> > > >> NUL > > > > > > Yes, "nul" case-insensitively. > > > > If I remember correctly, even something like C:\tmp\nul.txt would serve > > as null device > > Yes, any file name whose basename is nul.WHATEVER is also a null > device. "nul" is just the simplest form of all possible ones. > > > though I cannot vouch for this remaining true with NT-based Windows > > systems. It was the case for those versions running on top of MSDOS > > I'm pretty sure. > > It still works on modern Windows systems as well.
This was an old msdos batch file trick. There was no way to directly tell if a directory existed, But if c:\some\dir\nul "existed" then c:\some\dir did. Ugh. Glad those days are long past... -Dale