Why does this happen?

[zimagirl79]

FisionChips posted this question on another forum and it's got me wondering so I'm asking here too.

Try to create a new folder in windows (anywhere; I used My Documents) and name it con

It will not accept that folder name and reverts to "new folder" every time. I had the idea that maybe it needed more than 3 characters, but abc works.

So does anyone here know why we can't name a folder "con" ??

[xpgeek]

Saw this on another forum couple days ago too.

The following reserved words cannot be used as the name of a file: CON, PRN, AUX, CLOCK$, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, and LPT9. Also, reserved words followed by an extension—for example, NUL.tx7—are invalid file names.

This comes from back in the days ( 95/98 ) where if you tried to go to c:\con\con or c:\nul\nul it would bluescreen your system with a VX2 error. This all because con and nul (and a couple of other words) are reserved DOS words. In my earlier years, I changed my school's homepage for netscape (not even IE) to be c:\con\con and it would consistantly crash the computer when netscape was opened.

[zimagirl79]

Hmmm...I learn something new every day. Thanks for the reply ;)

[Calldean]

Ah the good ole days of DOS! Bring em' back I say.