Why can't you create a folder called 'con' in Windows?

Ah, yes, I recall clearing people out of rooms in MSN gaming zone by linking to file:/c:\con\con\con\con :D

Used to have serious fun with this at school back in the win98 days. Usually involved Microsoft Word's autocorrect. It started off with setting it to recognise "the" and auto-correcting it to "bum" "or porn" or something equally 16-year-old-ish, but then I got smart and set it to autocorrect to "file:/c:\con\con\con\con" and bsod's were widespread for about two days :D Hey I might have been 16 or 17 but it's still funny now :p
 
Another strange one, I tried to create a shutdown batch file that I named shutdown.bat - damn thing didn't work (it just seems to run and run over and over). Took me ages to work out that the name of the file was the problem - anything else and it works fine. Couldn't be bothered to find out why, answers on a postcard if anyone does know!
 
Another strange one, I tried to create a shutdown batch file that I named shutdown.bat - damn thing didn't work (it just seems to run and run over and over). Took me ages to work out that the name of the file was the problem - anything else and it works fine. Couldn't be bothered to find out why, answers on a postcard if anyone does know!
You cannot call you batch file shutdown.bat when the batch file is going to call shutdown.exe - rename you batch file to something else.

TrUz
 
Another strange one, I tried to create a shutdown batch file that I named shutdown.bat - damn thing didn't work (it just seems to run and run over and over). Took me ages to work out that the name of the file was the problem - anything else and it works fine. Couldn't be bothered to find out why, answers on a postcard if anyone does know!

I'm sure I've told you why before...

(He lives in the room next door to me)
 
I'm sure I've told you why before...

(He lives in the room next door to me)

I'm pretty sure you have too, though when has that ever made a difference ;)

EDIT: I just went next door, he proceeded to explain it again (with a diagram and everything, it was quite impressive).
 
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These are legacy DOS keywords which is why Windows prevents them being used.

The used to be a good one where you type "con\con" and that would set an infinite stack loop running which would eventually use up all the memory and crash the system after about 1-3 minutes. Pretty sure it doesn't work on NT though :p
 
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