Adding FGL to the hierarchical libraries

Carl Witty cwitty at newtonlabs.com
Thu Jan 15 10:15:27 EST 2004


On Thu, 2004-01-15 at 01:32, Keith Wansbrough wrote:
> > Don't name the intermediate directories (subheirarchies) or modules Aux.
> > On Windows platforms (at least 2k, almost certainly earlier ones as well
> > though) aux (or aux.* in general) is a special file name. 
> 
> Certainly since MSDOS 2.0, possibly even 1.0.
> 
> IIRC, the reserved names include aux:, con:, prn:, com1:, com2:,
> com3:, com4:, lpt1:, lpt2:, lpt3:, and nul:.  The syntax with the
> trailing colon is official, but not necessary.  So don't name anything
> with these names :-(

A little testing reveals that (under Windows 2000) the bad list includes
at least com1 through com9 and lpt1 through lpt9 (and, as Derek (I
think) mentions above, if X is bad, then so is X.*; so Con.lhs is bad).

In case people haven't figured it out by the file names, these are the
Windows equivalent of Unix character special files.  "nul:" is very
similar to the Unix "/dev/null"; except that instead of being stuffed
away in /dev, Windows pretends there's a copy in every directory (so
instead of using "/dev/null", you could use "nul:", or ".\nul", or
"..\nul.asdffdsa", or "c:\Nul.hs"; all are equivalent).

Carl Witty



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