blog-j: Symbolizing, Coding, Objectifying, Processing

In wildly esoteric ‘not a bug’ news…

At work today, my buddy here was having a bit o’ difficult renaming a file on a ftp site. And on his local machine. Just a simple little gif file he wanted named ‘con.gif’. Short and sweet, and relevant to the site at hand.

Windows, however, was having none of this. Every attempt to name the file ‘con.gif’ resulted in the error: ‘Windows cannot rename the file. A file of the same name already exists.’ Completely stymied (particularly because there was no file named ‘con.gif’ in the folders he was working with), he asked me to come over and confirm that he hadn’t gone completely bonkers over the curse course of the day.

Sure enough, I attemped to rename the file. This is, as you can imagine, something I have done countless times before. Same result. I quickly checked his folder setup, ensuring that Windows was displaying hidden and OS files. Check, and check. Then I tried something you’re probably thinking of right now: I created a text file, naming it ‘con.txt’. Well, that’s not exactly true - I created a text file; on naming it ‘con.txt’, however, I received a remarkably familiar error: ‘A file of the same name already exists.’

Well, that was that. Quick search on Google, and I find that Windows will not allow you to name a file or folder ‘CON’, as it opens up a security hole. So it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

I bloody wish they’d come up with a better error message to display.

Read the details @ mjsabby.com.