On Aug 12, 2006, at 4:10 PM, William Squires wrote:
And when I try to name (or rename) a new, blank bitmap file on the desktop to "con.bmp", it changes it back to New Bitmap Image.bmp - that's 'not an error' either :) But it's definitely a bug! I can name it "coon.bmp", or "conn.bmp", but it stringently resists my attempts to name the file "con.bmp" - weird...
Not quite a bug, just a very old feature. In the olden days of MS- DOS, "con" referred to "console", the keyboard/display you are using to interface with the computer, similar to UNIX's /dev/tty. There used to be a command that would set the lines-per-screen of the con to 25, 40, or 80 if I recall.
Because MS-DOS does allow simple piping ( < con and > con) it doesn't allow you to use con as a filename; there's be no way to determine if a command including "< con" referred to the console or some file named con. This is also (apparently) true for LPT (printer port), COM (serial port), PRN (printer), AUX (?), and NUL (probably UNIX's /dev/ null).
Eric Williams Oxalyn Software http://software.oxalyn.com/ AE Monitor http://software.oxalyn.com/AEMonitor/ _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives of this list here: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
