4 ms·

1995-ish. Telstra (Australia Telecom). Probably about 50k desktop computers across the organisation. One day a small file turned up in everyone's network home d

by Jedd 5mo ago

1995-ish. Telstra (Australia Telecom). Probably about 50k desktop computers across the organisation. One day a small file turned up in everyone's network home directory called null. A *nix person had evidently had a go at writing a .bat file. Why do we need to adopt extant standards? (I was going to ask, why standardise? But realised that might confound the North Americans. : )

lelanthran 5mo ago
>One day a small file turned up in everyone's network home directory called null. A *nix person had evidently had a go at writing a .bat file I assume that they first tried /dev/null which failed, so then moved onto just plain null? Otherwise it would not make sense that a unix programmer did this. More likely ula dos programmer misspelled NUL as null.
- jtoledo 5mo ago
  I've already created a 'NULL' file, but it was not a Unix thing... It was just because I got confused if it was NULL as in the programming languages I usually use.
- 3form 5mo ago
  Unix programmer remembered that in there's no /dev/null in DOS and that it's something shorter, and tried null which worked. Didn't check the directory contents afterwards. So basically your first sentence - doesn't seem at all unlikely to me. (I mean, I think it happened to me at least once too)
- rep_lodsb 5mo ago
  Fun fact: "/dev/nul" (with only one L) would have worked, even if there is no directory with that name. That's been a feature since DOS 2.0, there was even an undocumented option AVAILDEV to make the prefix mandatory, instead of having device names present everywhere. But it broke the common trick used to detect if a directory exists ("if exist c:\some\path\nul").
cachius 5mo ago
What text was in there that he tried to discard?
- drfloyd51 5mo ago
  Asking the real questions!
ale42 5mo ago
Some Logitech drivers installation program (not sure which version or what product) did it too... found a file named NULL on my HD, and of course there was a BAT file with something > NULL.

by Jedd 5mo ago

lelanthran 5mo ago

>One day a small file turned up in everyone's network home directory called null. A *nix person had evidently had a go at writing a .bat file I assume that they first tried /dev/null which failed, so then moved onto just plain null? Otherwise it would not make sense that a unix programmer did this. More likely ula dos programmer misspelled NUL as null.

jtoledo 5mo ago
I've already created a 'NULL' file, but it was not a Unix thing... It was just because I got confused if it was NULL as in the programming languages I usually use.
3form 5mo ago
Unix programmer remembered that in there's no /dev/null in DOS and that it's something shorter, and tried null which worked. Didn't check the directory contents afterwards. So basically your first sentence - doesn't seem at all unlikely to me. (I mean, I think it happened to me at least once too)
rep_lodsb 5mo ago
Fun fact: "/dev/nul" (with only one L) would have worked, even if there is no directory with that name. That's been a feature since DOS 2.0, there was even an undocumented option AVAILDEV to make the prefix mandatory, instead of having device names present everywhere. But it broke the common trick used to detect if a directory exists ("if exist c:\some\path\nul").

cachius 5mo ago

What text was in there that he tried to discard?

drfloyd51 5mo ago
Asking the real questions!

ale42 5mo ago

Some Logitech drivers installation program (not sure which version or what product) did it too... found a file named NULL on my HD, and of course there was a BAT file with something > NULL.