Subject: Re: phantom file "aux" under bash b19
From: [email-masked]

13 Apr 1998 18:22:39 -0700
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]

[email-masked] wrote:

>Hi Jason, you wrote:
>
>: Unfortunately, the magic meaning of those names is hardcoded into Win32.
>: There's no way to avoid the problem if you use Win32 APIs, which cygwin
>: does.
>
>Really? Although I haven't tried it, several people already wrote on this
>list that the workaround is using UNC \\.\ prefix!
>Sorry, I've no time for integrating that transparently into cygwin DLL!

[email-masked] replied:

> \\.\ has been mentioned only to decribe how to get rid of files with
> names like aux.txt, which have been created by accident.
> It hasn't anything to do with Cygnus or cygwin, but is a "feature" of
> the WinNT Posix subsystem.

I think that the point is that cygwin could use the \\.\ UNC for the file
if it detected that the file name was "aux", "conX", etc. and was not
being referenced in the /dev directory.  That way, the underlying win32 calls
would not be given a file name that they would use as a device name.
Presumably there is greater cost in using the UNC type name for the files,
otherwise cygwin could just use this for accessing all files.

marcus hall
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