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posted by Fnord666 on Friday March 24 2017, @06:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the didn't-need-those-folders-anyway dept.

in with a story on Robert Elder Software blog entitled Silently Corrupting an Eclipse Workspace: The Ultimate Prank:

Next time your co-worker asks:

"What's the best way to back up my Eclipse workspace on Windows?"

you can tell them "Just right-click on it and select 'Send to Compressed (zipped) folder' and save the zip file". Unbeknownst to them, you just pulled the ultimate prank by telling them to make a corrupted backup!

          What your friend probably doesn't realize is that the Windows 'Send to Compressed (zipped) folder' utility has a mandatory optional feature to automatically not include certain folders in the archive without telling you. This is a great feature because it demonstrates the excellent sense of humour that the authors of Microsoft Windows have. This feature was no doubt included to allow you to play a variety of hilarious pranks on others by causing them lose data, only to find out about it years later when they want to open the archive and recover it.

The blog post goes on to identify other idiosyncrasies with how Windows mishandles directories whose names start with a period and/or contain Unicode characters.

Reasons you haven't switched to Linux (cont.):

  • 3. Windows has superior development tools.

What other issues have you found with how Windows handles filenames?


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday March 24 2017, @07:54PM (7 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Friday March 24 2017, @07:54PM (#483830)

    Symbolic links have long been source of major schadenfreude in Windows. Not sure if that got finally improved.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by DannyB on Friday March 24 2017, @08:05PM (6 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 24 2017, @08:05PM (#483837) Journal

    While I would discourage the use of Windows in the strongest terms, there is this [microsoft.com].

    There are three types of file links supported in the NTFS file system: hard links, junctions, and symbolic links. This topic is an overview of hard links and junctions.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday March 24 2017, @08:45PM (4 children)

      by bob_super (1357) on Friday March 24 2017, @08:45PM (#483856)

      I know they exist, but until XP at least, they were implemented in a quite confusing and dangerous way for those who expect Unix-like behavior.
      I'm assuming/hoping that they fixed that to support the new linux subsystem.

      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 24 2017, @08:55PM (3 children)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday March 24 2017, @08:55PM (#483860)

        >I'm assuming/hoping that they fixed that to support the new linux subsystem.

        Oh, dear child, don't you know how these things are done? The new Linux subsystem was patched to work with Windows 10 style symlinks. It will continue to work with 97.44% compatibility until such time as they decide to not update the patch to keep up with changes in Windows 10 security implementations.

        Change Windows to support Linux? Do you want a chair thrown at you?

        --
        🌻🌻 [google.com]
        • (Score: 5, Funny) by bob_super on Friday March 24 2017, @09:04PM (2 children)

          by bob_super (1357) on Friday March 24 2017, @09:04PM (#483866)

          > Do you want a chair thrown at you?

          Impact in 3 seconds ... 7 minutes ... 15 seconds ... 42 hours ... 1 second ...

          • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 24 2017, @09:08PM

            by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday March 24 2017, @09:08PM (#483869)

            >Impact in 3 seconds ... 7 minutes ... 15 seconds ... 42 hours ... 1 second ...

            Oh how I miss the days of Disk Defrag....

            --
            🌻🌻 [google.com]
          • (Score: 2) by edIII on Friday March 24 2017, @09:17PM

            by edIII (791) on Friday March 24 2017, @09:17PM (#483873)

            This is the funniest thing I have read on SN so far.

            Congratulations :)

            --
            Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
    • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday March 24 2017, @11:26PM

      by butthurt (6141) on Friday March 24 2017, @11:26PM (#483915) Journal

      I suppose that .lnk files were a way of achieving a similar effect with a FAT file-system, but have been kept for backwards compatibility.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_shortcut#Microsoft_Windows [wikipedia.org]