Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by DeltaWhy 3624 days ago
That should be NUL (one L). Interestingly, when I tried it in Powershell, 'type NUL' reports that the file does not exist, but in CMD, 'type NUL' outputs nothing (it's the DOS equivalent of UNIX's /dev/null). So apparently some APIs will allow you to use those as filenames while others will choke on them.
2 comments
jstarks 3624 days ago
It is likely that the .NET base class libraries block NUL and the other special file names that Win32 supports. This would explain why PowerShell (which is written in C#) behaves differently from cmd (which is written in C).
link
warbiscuit 3624 days ago
Thanks, corrected that. Shows what I get for transcribing wrong :)

Yeah, windows is kinda crazy inconsistent for some of these. I had a file (created under Linux) which ended in a space... drove windows nuts. Could list it, open it in some programs, but couldn't even open/rename by shortname under DOS or python.

link