[pjc50]

> I never knew that NUL was a reserved word as a file. I would, and probably still will make this mistake in the future

While we're here: NUL, COM<n>, LPT<n> and AUX are reserved.

[cesarb]

> While we're here: NUL, COM<n>, LPT<n> and AUX are reserved.

Worse: they're reserved with any extension. Have a file in your repository called "aux.rs"? It will cause problems on Windows.

[metajack]

Which happened in Servo already: https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/1226

[teh_klev]

It's swings and roundabouts. Say I create an app or tool that happily resides in c:\proc\whatever then I turn my attention to creating a Linux version and specify /proc/whatever then ... boom? Sure, it's maybe a convoluted example, but for the creator of this "nul" package they got burned by something that's actually common knowledge in the MS world.

I think you need to be a wee bit pro-active and take a look at your potential deployment targets and try and guard against these types of naming issues. Unix and Linux aren't the only (one true) operating systems in the world.

[majewsky]

The right solution, actually, is to use a library that gives you the right path for the thing that you need to do depending on the conventions of the platform. For example QStandardPaths in Qt: http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qstandardpaths.html

  QString appDataDir = QStandardPaths::writableLocation(QStandardPaths::AppDataLocation);
  // ~/Library/Application Support/<APPNAME> on macOS
  // C:/Users/<USER>/AppData/Roaming/<APPNAME> on Windows
  // ~/.local/share/<APPNAME> on Linux

[teh_klev]

Still doesn't solve the case where the developer just wants to slap something in the root of the C: drive on windows from the outset (Cygwin I seem to remember defaults to c:\Cygwin for example...again slightly convoluted).

Also those locations are user specific, there's nothing there to support the use-case of an app that's available to all users, or might just be a system service (/daemon).

[akavel]

And CON, as Macha mentions in a sister comment. An idiom I remember from old times in DOS, for quickly writing some contents into a file - equivalent to `cat > myfile.txt` on Linux:

  COPY CON MYFILE.TXT

[ConfucianNardin]

You can also do

    type con > myfile.txt

[krylon]

IIRC, CON was reserved, too, at one point (which would mean it most likely would be reserved today)?

Also, have fun trying to delete C:\Program Files\Xerox ;-)