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Special Devices

Name
Use
\\.\a: The diskette as a raw device. (Not available on Windows 9x.)
\\.\tape0 The tape drive as a raw device. (Not available on Windows 9x.)
aux The auxiliary port.
con The console device. This is the text window the shell is running in. Reading from it reads the keyboard; writing to it writes to the screen.
conin$ The Win32 console keyboard. A read-only device.
conout$ The Win32 console display. A write-only device.
com1 .. com7 The various async communication ports you may have. They can be read or written.
lpt1 .. lpt4 The line printer ports.
nul The null device. Reads return end-of-file; writes are discarded.
prn The print spooler queue.

Hamilton C shell recognizes the Windows special device names regardless of whether they are typed in upper or lower case and regardless of whether there is a trailing colon. For example, COM1:, COM1 and com1 all refer to the same device. Not all devices will be installed on any particular machine.



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