The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5) - "not alot of people know that"

"not alot of people know that"

.. or perhaps they do, but I didn't.

Try opening a new file in notepad and saving it as con.c or con.h.

A message is displayed saying "This file name is a reserved device name. Please choose another name."

Why can't windows differentiate between "con" (as in console presumably) and con.c. The answer is probably economic but who knows.

Ben
Thursday, May 20, 2004

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/10/22/55388.aspx

KayJay
Thursday, May 20, 2004

Why am I not surprised. Instead of doing the logical thing and letting the user say "I don't want a .lst file", they go in and make magic names. Jeez, only Microsoft would think that was A Good Solution.

And it's not a clueless newbie thing either. DOS 1.0 was for people who knew what they were doing (I was one of them). Heaven help the asshat trying to assemble a file who couldn't figure out /L or somesuch disabled the listing file.

Snotnose
Thursday, May 20, 2004

good old notepad,
do you know that if .LOG is in the text file in a separate line, then notepad appends the current date at the end?

Thursday, May 20, 2004

This issue may well predate Microsoft's existence. A lot of the behavior of DOS 1.0 was inspired by CP/M. CP/M definitely had magic device names, though I can't recall offhand whether it exhibited the same behavior when device names had extensions.

John C.
Thursday, May 20, 2004

Thanks a million, KayJay. That was really information and I did not know it.

The One You Loved (TOYL)
Friday, May 21, 2004

You are most welcome. Do not forget to thank Mr. Chen!

KayJay
Friday, May 21, 2004

Anonymous wrote...
>good old notepad,
>do you know that if .LOG is in the text file in a separate >ine, then notepad appends the current date at the end?

What is this about? How can it be achieved? I would like more info on this... anybody for it.

Cheers

The One You Loved (TOYL)
Friday, May 21, 2004

1. Open notepad.
2. Type ".LOG" on the first line.
3. Change line and type something else.
4. Save & close.
5. Reopen with notepad - you'll see a timestamp below what you've written.
6. Type some more.
5. Save & close.

etc...

Enjoy :)

Paulo Caetano
Friday, May 21, 2004

Doesn't appear to work in win2K

Stephen Jones
Friday, May 21, 2004

"Doesn't appear to work in win2K"

I just did it in Win2K Prof.

Here's the result:

---
.LOG

Eu vi um sapo
13:25 21-05-2004

A encher o papo estava a papar
13:25 21-05-2004

15:42 21-05-2004
---

I've edited it 3 times. All the timestamps were added automatically, and were there after I closed and reopened the file.

Paulo Caetano
Friday, May 21, 2004

Actually, it works a litle different from what I expected.

The timestamp gets added the next time you *open* the file. Notice that the last time stamp in my previous post (15:42 21-05-2004) occurs much later than the other two. I closed the file, and didn't save it. I opened it again, it looked like this:

---
.LOG

Eu vi um sapo
13:25 21-05-2004

A encher o papo estava a papar
13:25 21-05-2004

15:47 21-05-2004
---

Notice the last timestamp now shows 5 minutes later.

Paulo Caetano
Friday, May 21, 2004

I was typing .log
You must type .LOG

Suggests it comes from Unix since DOS is not case sensitive.

Stephen Jones
Friday, May 21, 2004

Heh. You learn something new every day. :)

(Having fun with .LOG files now. If my boss complains, may I send him to you guys?)

Martha
Friday, May 21, 2004

That .LOG trick is the coolest thing I have seen since... hmm... hey, ever!

Monday, May 24, 2004