The popCON trick 😃

Salut folks, its time to learn some tricks and cheat our friends to bet some good amount of bucks.

Today we are going to see something, which is not possible to do on every windows machine and the alternate way to achieve the same.

Let’s bet

Bet your friend to create or rename a folder or file name as ‘con’ (either con / CON / Con / cOn / coN) anywhere on the windows machine like the below

Your friend wont be able to create such folder or file with name ‘con’ and end up with an error message, funny right and congrats you won the bet 😀 now you might also wonder why we were not able to create such folder or file name with con. So lets crack some technical stuff to know about it.

Why we are not able to create folder / file named ‘con’ ?

Windows system software internally manages and create temporary folders and files to handle the operations, in which CON is one of the reserved name used to create folder and files while doing some IO operations. CON is the reserved name (keyword) to establish the connection, lets say you are printing something on printer then the system software will create a temporary folder or file in the name of ‘con’ for such processes.

So the wonder is over, we know that why we were not able to create a folder / file named ‘con’ and we won the bet. But is there a way to create it? yes, we can. Lets amaze our friend by showing him a folder named ‘con’ created by you.

trick to create ‘con’ folder

1. Open the Command prompt ( click start type cmd )
2. Go to any location which you like to create the folder, I am going to create in the desktop.
3. Create a folder using make directory command ‘md’ as like below
4. That’s All! check your desktop con folder will be created, but you cannot use it as we know it is reserved by windows OS.
5. Use remove directory ‘rd’ command to delete the created ‘con’ folder.

bonus tricks

Apart from ‘con’ there are much more reserved names which cannot be used as name for the folders and files, such as

• PRN
• AUX
• NUL
• COM0, COM1, COM2, … COM9
• LPT0, LPT1, LPT2, ….  LPT9