Thread by @mcclure111

Okay so do I have this right: a file named CON is illegal, a file named COM1 is illegal, but COM is legal and that's why Java classpaths having directory structures like "com/oracle/swing" and therefore directories named "com" is not a problem?

Today in cursed knowledge: WSL will allow you to create and read back a file named "com1" on the NTFS partition, and Windows Explorer can see and interact with it in a basic way, but win32 apps such as Notepad will fail if they attempt to open it

https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/1390375012994097152

If you attempt to *delete* the "com1" file from Windows Explorer, it announces it needs administrator privileges. I did not attempt to do this with administrator privileges in case it deletes a Windows global device handle or something similarly catastrophic

This is a special case of a general problem where NTFS actually has broader capabilities than Windows itself, with my favorite/least favorite example being that NTFS allows you to switch between case-sensitive & case-insensitive on a *per-directory basis*

https://twitter.com/mindfuck_inc/status/1390379916244529152

The only convenient way I'm aware of to access NTFS's secret case-sensitive capabilities is to use WSL and turn on an obscure flag in /etc/wsl.conf devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/au…
For about 3 weeks in 2018, it was on by default, which lead to… problems
github.com/microsoft/WSL/… .

Among my various dubious achievements in life is I am one of (what I assume to be) a fairly small number of people who have ever organically encountered this dialog in Unity

(It's easy to hit this if you store a Unity project on a network drive. I wasn't using network drives.)

Sorry, the link above is wrong. This is the MS blog post explaining how to activate the unspeakable horrors (potentially, in win32, literally unspeakable) devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/pe…