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Which isn’t such a great design either. DEV is after all a perfectly legitimate directory name. It would have been even weirder to be able to have a file named
by pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
Which isn’t such a great design either. DEV is after all a perfectly legitimate directory name. It would have been even weirder to be able to have a file named AUX.H in any directory except C:\DEV.
I wonder why didn’t they instead add a switch to bring back the requirement of a colon after the device name.
- zinekeller 5y ago> Which isn’t such a great design either. I'll guess that you didn't knew that DOS 1.x don't have any concept of directories. It's essentially a novo terra for DOS applications, and makes sense considering that Unix also standardised at /dev.
- pwdisswordfish8 5y agoI did know that. The point is that unlike Unix, MS-DOS had no FHS to go with its hierarchical file system, which would cleanly separate the namespaces of user files from device nodes. (The file system layout didn’t even start becoming standardised until the Windows 95 days.) One could fairly legitimately create a DEV directory in the root of the file system and expect to be able to keep their own files there, naming them arbitrarily. The edge case is now harder to hit, but it’s still basically the same mistake. DJGPP even has a FAQ item about a similar issue: <http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/v2faq/faq22_21.html http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/v2faq/faq22_21.html> (though that one is caused by DJGPP’s own Unix emulation layer)