RE: Data streams being treated as files in Cygwin

[Igor Peshansky <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Thu, 11 May 2006, Dave Korn wrote:

> On 11 May 2006 16:11, Igor Peshansky wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 11 May 2006, Dave Korn wrote:
> >
> >> On 11 May 2006 16:00, Igor Peshansky wrote:
> >>
> >>> On Thu, 11 May 2006, Dave Korn wrote:
> >>
> >>>>   Cygwin's file handling relies on the underlying facilities of the
> >>>> Windows O/S, for the most part.
> >>>
> >>> Yes, and that leads to some funny behavior -- see below.
> >>
> >>> Interestingly enough:
> >>>
> >>> $ echo "BLAH" > a:b
> >>> bash: a:b: No such file or directory
> >>
> >>   Perhaps you forgot to put a floppy in the drive?
> >
> > Gee, you think so? :-)
>
>   Hmmm... let's try....
>
> dk@rainbow /test/ads> echo "blah" > a:b
> bash: a:b: No medium found
> dk@rainbow /test/ads>
>
>   OK, I think I get it now.  Let me re-word my observation:
>
> >>   Perhaps you forgot to put the floppy drive in?

Yep, yep.  But I knew exactly what the issue was -- just trying to make
the comment below (first sentence).

> > The point I was making was that Windows isn't consistent about treating
> > filenames as streams vs. disk references, due to the reuse of the ':'
> > character.  I'm guessing it would be possible to add streams to a file
> > called 'a', but not through the interfaces used by Cygwin.
>
>   Gee, you think not?  :-)
>
> dk@rainbow /test/ads> echo "blah" > ./a:b
> dk@rainbow /test/ads> ls -la a
> -rw-r--r-- 1 dk Domain Users 0 May 11 16:16 a
> dk@rainbow /test/ads>

...as I found out after about 15 seconds after hitting "Send", by reading
the main NTFS streams entry on MSDN.  It's amasing what a little RTFM
*before sending the message* can do... :-)
	Igor
-- 
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