A useless bug into Windows 95/98

[TheCharizard31]

If you don't know...
https://youtu.be/Of__44_-Tkk?t=198
TheCharizard31

[OltScript131]

It's not a bug...

[TheCharizard31]

It's not a bug...

Yes, it's a real bug. When you type C:\con\con, your system is supposed to crash ? Note : Please go to 3:18.

TheCharizard31

[OltScript131]

It's the same thing if we do "aux"
In Windows 7, it does not accept this kind of word if we name a folder "aux" for example...

I read somewhere that there was a reason for that, but I do not remember anymore unfortunately...

[mibrab]

It's the same thing if we do "aux"
In Windows 7, it does not accept this kind of word if we name a folder "aux" for example...

I read somewhere that there was a reason for that, but I do not remember anymore unfortunately...

It's because these names are reserved for usage in the command line. For example doing `echo test > COM1` would send the output to COM port #1 instead of a file called COM1. This behaviour is embedded deeply in the file system code and so Windows can't access files with these names and instead tries to access the devices these names represent. This is a leftover from DOS where doing something like `echo something > PRN` to print wouldn't be all that uncommon.

And yes, the C:\con\con BSOD is actually a bug, while there are a few ways to trigger a manual bugcheck for debugging, this definitely wasn't intended to be one of them

There's an interesting Twitter thread available talking about this [click]