something strange about windows's DOS shell

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I wrote following command in windows XP's DOS shell and something strange happened:

C++

C:\Foleder1\copy sample.txt :

because of my typing mistake, I wrote ":" instead of "D:", but it copied the sample.txt to somewhere I cant find!

I searched my whole HDD for sample.txt but the only instance of this file is the original one which is in C:\Folder1
Do you know where ":" path actually is in Win-XP DOS shell?

you may tell ":" is current path and the file have overwritten on itself but look at this, if you run that command for the first time, this will be the result:

C++

1 file copied.

next time you run that command it will ask you:

C++

overwrite sample.txt? (yes/no/all)

so if its going to write the file on itself, both result have to be the same but its not.

thanks in advance for your help

Posted 20-Oct-12 8:56am

Member 9531583

Updated 20-Oct-12 11:09am

Sandeep Mewara

v3

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Alan N · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-20T12:21:00

Yes it's quite clever!

You've hit upon a syntax for creating an NTFS alternate data stream and I think you will have created an alternate stream named :sample.txt which is a complete copy of the original file but hidden from normal view.

A bit of background is available in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(file_system)[^] especially in the links at the end of the article.

As XP doesn't contain anything for viewing or deleting these I recommend you download a tool such as AlternateStreamView[^] which will let you see what you've done.

Suprisingly Notepad will let you view a text format alternate data stream. Try typing Notepad :Sample.txt in a command window to see what happens.

Alan.