Opening a file named "con" (possibly followed by a dot and some extraneous characters) for writing from within perl does not signal an error, even though windows doesn't allow it. Instead, the opened file handle acts as if everything is OK - you may write to it, close it, select it, flush it, wine and dine it. You may even spend an hour trying to figure out why, when all of these things happen without error, your file doesn't actually exist when your program is finished (until you realize what silly things your operating system is doing or preventing you from doing).
I'm using the portable version of strawberry out of the box on win xp. Another more serpentine language gives a permission error when trying to open 'CON.dat' (or any of the various other problematic DOS names). This annoyed me enough to post here: Anybody know of a way to make perl gag when trying to open the special, un-openable DOS files like CON?
