I'll never claim to know everything about Linux nor Windows, I know a lot more about the former than the latter, mainly as the Windows is a closed source product. As such it doesn't get my attention as much, unless something is going wrong.... Today I have found an effect I can't explain (at least not easily) in windows, clearly it's some sort of reserved file name or type effect.... Maybe you can explain this to me.
So, open any folder, right click and go to create a new text file...
Once you have the file...
Change the name to "COM" and a port number, so "COM1" in my case.... It can be any COM port name, even if you don't have that port installed or active on your machine....
Once you complete the name, or change focus of the text entry (by say taking a screen shot - not actually committing the new file to disk) you get this strange message...
"The Specified device name is invalid"....
What device? I'm trying to create a filename. I was immediately a little puzzled, I've used Windows since Windows 2.0 I've never ran into this issue.
Googling around I find a chap on social.technet.microsoft.com saying not to use a whole plethora of names for files or folder as they're reserved, I have never heard of this.
The official Microsoft advice likewise says not to use these values, and it kindled a memory in me from programming in DOS 6 back in the mid 90's, one would in Pascal, you could "println(PRN, 'some message');" and see the message print out on the printer.
I find it amazingly odd that these files are still reserved in 2018, they're proper nouns, they're things you may want to name files, and they have a FULL Path, which makes them very distinct than the COM port device. Its odd, trust me.
But the oddest thing is, what does Windows do, what is the piece of code picked up and made to run that message box upon creation of the file? And I've got to wonder how exploitable that maybe in local malware to open lots of message boxes and annoy the user.
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