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I ran a program on Windows 7 that was compiled under Cygwin and passed "NUL" as an output file name. Instead of suppressing output it actually created a file named "NUL" in the current directory. (Apparently it expects "/dev/null", even on Windows.) Now I'm stuck with this "NUL" file that I cannot delete!
I've already tried:
remove() in a C program - also failsHow can I get rid of these NUL files (I have several by now), short of installing the full Cygwin environment and compiling a C program under Cygwin to do it?
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The null device is a special file that discards all data written to it, but reports that the write operation succeeded. Nul is often used to hide the output (or error output) of a command. It is called NUL rather than NULL for historical reasons, many other devices have 3 character names: AUX, PRN, CON, etc.
To do this, start by opening the Start menu (Windows key), typing run, and hitting Enter. In the dialogue that appears, type cmd and hit Enter again. With the command prompt open, enter del /f filename, where filename is the name of the file or files (you can specify multiple files using commas) you want to delete.
You can do this using the Windows GUI. Enter "*. wlx" in the search box in explorer. Then after the files have been found, select them all (CTRL-A) and then delete using the delete key or context menu.
Open a command prompt and use these commands to first rename and then delete the NUL file:
C:\> rename \\.\C:\..\NUL. deletefile.txt C:\> del deletefile.txt Using the \\.\ prefix tells the high-level file I/O functions to pass the filename unparsed to the device driver - this way you can access otherwise invalid names.
Read this article about valid file / path names in Windows and the various reserved names.
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