What is magical about the word “CON”

For a typical user who belongs to the age of MS-DOS , the discussions on why you can not create a file or directory named CON on your machine does not make much sense. But for a new age user who directly exposed him or her to GUI , it may be a nice topic of discussion

There are so many discussions going on the social networking sites about why you can not create  a folder named CON  .

In  Microsoft  operating system environment , the word CON  refers to console which is considered as standard  input. The word PRN is representing the printer device attached to your parallel  port , the word COM refers to communication port and so on .

So the operating systems will not permit you to create folders or files using these  words because they are considered as device files

Take the case of a typical file creation process in your command prompt

  type the command  copy con newfile , a file named Newfile is created by standard input redirection . ie copying what ever you typed in to the console to a file named Newfile . 

So your operating system assigns a special function to the file named   CON  .

since a folder is nothing but a file with a directory attribute , we can not create a directory named CON.

But if you are really keen to create a folder named con on your system , type the steps on the screenshot below