CON folder mystery

here’s the story:

Back in the old days, in the dark and dreary world of MS-DOS, there were many I/O devices that were referred to by reserved names in the OS. Whenever users used these words, the OS took them as references for I/O devices.

Some examples of such reserved words are CON, LPT1, LPT2, COM1, PRN, NUL. These words are still reserved even today in Windows, and that’s why you cannot create folders by these names.

So, will we *never* be able to create a folder named ‘CON’?

The answer is certainly not ‘NO’, but it isn’t very straightforward. Try the following command in the Command prompt:

md .\con\

and lo, you have your CON folder! Navigate to that folder in Windows, and you will find that its a real folder named ‘CON’.

Now try deleting that folder! Much to your dismay, you can’t! Unless you type

rd .\con\

Interesting bite, isn’t it?