[garaetjjte]

Other magic aliases include CON, PRN, AUX, COM1-9 and LPT1-9. They are aliased to respective devices in Win32 namespace "\\.\". COMs and LPTs above 9 don't have aliases in global namespace and must be accessed explictly in Win32 namespace, eg. "\\.\COM10" (which itself is symlink to NT native "\Device\Serial9")

In fact, it is possible to create files named NUL, COM1, etc. using \\?\ (eg. "\\?\C:\NUL" is valid path) prefix which disables parsing arcane Win32 magic files. Unfortunately these files are causing strange behaviour in applications that don't use that prefix, Explorer included.

source: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...

[monochromatic]

I still remember using "copy con foo.txt" and ending with ctrl-z to quickly create a file. It was years before I understood how that actually worked.