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Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2010 11:22:12 -0600
From: Eric Blake <eblake AT redhat DOT com>
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To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: where was mention of what creates NUL files?
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On 09/17/2010 11:12 AM, Daniel Barclay wrote:
> Does anyone recall a mention of what in CygWin (or possibly Emacs) creates
> files with a simple name of "NUL"?

Windows automagically maps the file named "NUL", in any directory, to 
the equivalent of Unix' /dev/null.  Cygwin doesn't create it, but all 
the same, portable programs should never name a file that 
case-insensitively matches 'nul', 'aux', or a host of other 
windows-magic names:

http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf.html#File-System-Conventions

Meanwhile, cygwin 1.7 has added some magic to use native NT calls to 
work around these limitations, so that you can have a file that appears 
to be named "NUL" from within cygwin, but which is really exploiting 
some 16-bit values outside of Unicode.  But various windows programs 
that use windows API (rather than lower-level NT API), including your 
file Explorer, have a hard time figuring out what cygwin did.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake AT redhat DOT com    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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