2 Nov
2006
2 Nov
'06
5:11 p.m.
Mike Orr wrote:
I have no idea why Microsoft thought it was a good idea to put the seven-odd device files in every directory. Why not force people to type the colon ("CON:").
Yes, this is a particularly stupid piece of braindamage on the part of the designers of MS-DOS. As far as I remember, even CP/M (which was itself a severely warped and twisted version of RT11) had the good sense to put colons on the end of such things.
But maybe "design" is too strong a word to apply to MS-DOS...
Anyhow, I think I agree that there's really nothing a path library can do about this. Whatever it tries to do, the fact will remain that it's impossible to have a regular file called "con", and users will have to live with that.
-- Greg