Why cant I name a folder 'con' on Windows?!

Because it's a special name, along with NUL, LPT, COM, and a few others, for old DOS special devices.

jUsT uSe LiNuX dUdE

It's a reserved word for legacy dos, these are all reserved and windows will prevent a file or folder being named

CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, and LPT9

@jespersh Here be dragons

@Stuxnet dOn’T yOu MeAn GnU/LiNuX

@devTea those are the worst people tbh.

Everyone knows what's being implied. Get off your high horse and stfu ffs

quick, someone boot up a Win9x machine and try to access C:\NUL\NUL

@Stuxnet R Stallman probably salty because most of the people mention linus but not him for linux

Linux and unix have all their special files stored in virtual filesystems: /proc, /dev, /sys, etc.

Windows [I think this started on dos] on the other hand tried to create something similar, except this was happening a long, long time ago, when computers stpred very little data and there was no need for a concept of directories. So MS reserved a set of filenames for special cases [mostly stuff you have in /dev in linux]. These filenames are in global namespace, so it doesn't matter which directory you're in. The filter applies everywhere :)

that's a bug Windows has for decades now :)

@jespersh Almost died laughing