Re: [Gpsbabel-code] Windows, COMx: x>=10, life's little lessons
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robertl
From: Robert L. <rob...@us...> - 2006-04-29 03:34:52
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------ Original Message ------ Received: Fri, 28 Apr 2006 10:06:49 PM CDT > > the first nine serial ports in > > Windows are "COM1:" through "COM9:", subsequent ones are named > > "\\.\\COM10" and so on. > > To make matters worse, I suspect that's only true of NT-based = > Windowses. Not that anyone uses 9x anymore anyway, right? I can neither confirm nor deny that theory, but it didn't come up in my research on this. Then again, I come from a land where Many serial ports= are common in the DOS/Win 3.1 era and while I wasn't involved in DOS/Windows = this totally doesn't sound familiar to me, so maybe it is an XP contraption. As for 9x, I don't know what population of the world uses it, but I have = a feeling that if we broke serial comms for them, we'd hear enough complain= ing that we'd want to make it stop. I think I'm going to do the cowardly thing and just always prepend it for= now, wait for 1,000 downloads of the beta, and wait for complaints. :-) > You might test it, but I *think* you can just always do the \\.\\COMn = > thing, for all values of n. = My experimentation today showed that to be correct for n =3D {2,12}. Har= dly an exhaustive matrix of n, but probably the interesting edges. > The \\.\\ thingy can actually be used to = > open just about any device driver; it's about as close as NT gets to /d= ev/. I thought that's why they had the colon in their reserved namespace, but = I'm certainly not going to defend the sanctity of the windows driver/device model. |