Speaking of YouTube.......

[Oddysey]

Hey, lookie here, I hatched a can o' worms! Lots of stuff to ponder over, but one thing's for sure - ProxRocks and I see eye-to-eye right down the line - there's not much point in going to a website that insists that it can control my computer better than I can. Oh really???? Would you care to place a little wager on that, Mr. Adobe?

I also like Graycode's method, I hadn't really thought about tricking software that way, hmmm.......

For today's history lesson, we'll find out that Linux (and *nix of all flavors) have no lock on the NUL device. In fact, it was there in IBM's JCL-OS (Job Command Language OS), and has been present in every OS since, no matter who makes 'em. Even the Commodore C-64 OS had a NUL device.

In the Microsoft OS world, ever since Dos 1.0 (and I still have my original copy of 1.1, I was a bit late to the party for 1.0), NUL has been a part and parcel of the gizzards of all OS's deriving and descending from that venerable start in life. You don't configure it so much as you simply use it. One way would be to copy a file to the NUL device, like so: (at a command prompt: )

copy *.tmp > nul

Not very useful, but wait, it gets better...... If I don't want to see any resulting messages from a command, I 'redirect' them to the NUL device, like so:

for %f in (*.*) do if exist d:%f del %f

This would spew out the error message "File not found" for every file that existed in the current directly, but not on D:. To cure that, enter the command like this:

for %f in (*.*) do if exist d:%f del %f > nul

That last part says to the OS 'any messages for the screen, send them instead to the NUL device'. Simple, neat and clean.

One more item, and this is useful, even in a GUI world. If we want to know if a directory exists, then we can query the OS like so:

if exist d:\somedir\nul echo "Yep, it's here"

The point being, the NUL device exists everywhere, except for non-existent folders.

I'm sure you can figure out what to do from there, eh?
</pedantics>

HTH



Oddysey

(Hey Ralph, how's my memory on that one? )