On 2016-08-22 22:39, Chris Angelico wrote: > Nope. On Windows, you would try/except it. There are myriad other > ways something could fail, and the only correct action is to > attempt it. Most of the reserved names will simply give an error;
The problem is that when opening such a pseudo-file, you can get unexpected behavior. In the Unix world, we're used to files-that-aren-t-files (such as things in /dev ). But a lot of Windows developers don't handle these cases, and so opening something like COM1 can end up hanging a program indefinitely instead of actually returning either an error or a file-handle. If you have a web-server running on Windows and can manage to coerce a file to have such a name, you might be able to hang the web-server process while it tries to read from (or write to) the serial port. And poof, near-instant DoS. -tkc -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
