Talk:Device file

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[edit] Merger Proposal

Due to overlap of useful information in the device node, device file, and devfs pages, I'm proposing a merger to device file system. An alternative suggestion would be to orthogonalize these articles. Poppafuze (talk) 21:19, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Comment

It seems to me that the existence of device file names in Windows may be somewhat analogous to their existence in 'nixes, but the implementation of the former is a serious aberration, which should be given special treatment so interested people may be aware of it. I only found out recently that XP still disallows names of this sort, including 'long' names like "con.air.avi" and "aux.jpeg" which are inaccessible to the ancient legacy applications for which the mechanism exists (basically, CP/M apps ported to DOS!). Though it also adds some functionality to .BAT files which was not in CPM, I would venture to guess that this mechanism is used only in very old legacy code whereas the *nix mechanism is integral to all I/O.

Since the *nix device file is a longstanding and enduring design feature, and the other is, to be blunt, a wart which Microsoft would like to bury but has bungled the job (and seems to be hoping nobody will notice), it's misleading to even imply that they are analogous.

In fact, aren't there special names for devices in windows that start with "\\|\" or something and therefore don't have the name collision problem? These should be discussed here. My understanding is that these are generally not useful on the command line but can be used in API calls.

The Windows reserved-name wart should have an article by itself, since there's more than one sentence worth of explaining to do about the implications. For instance, if a 'forbidden' filename exists on a samba server, the server (or the client??) will give it a new, mangled name so that windows can access it.

I haven't tried 'aux.txt' in Vista but I suspect it's the same as XP. It's good to see that Microsoft has finally removed 'ctrl-P' (echo to printer, another CP/M wart) from CMD.EXE; it was still there in Win2K, likewise causing far more confusion than actual benefit.

216.191.144.135 (talk) 16:16, 22 May 2008 (UTC)