we've all seen why some of the keywords back in the DOS days (CON, COM1, COM2, etc.) are not allowed as filenames or folder names (directory names for the oldies hehehe) in the local community thread.  do you also know that you can't have the same name for a subfolder or a file in the same folder?  logical but i did not know it until yesterday.  try the following:

1. goto command prompt (type cmd in the run dialog)
2. copy con temp
3. type in anything in the console which will be the contents of the temp file, end it by pressing F6 then enter.
4. make sure that a temp file is created by issuing a dir command.
5. md temp
   

you'll be greeted with a message "A subdirectory or file <name> already exists."

i discovered this yesterday when our build server suddenly stopped building.  eventhough we issued a force build, it will try to build for a few seconds then revert back to sleep mode.  i tried to access its log file, which is currently at 200 megabytes since june 2005.  they did not configure it to be a rollingfile just like log4net if there exists one in the thoughtworks logger.

i discovered that subversion could not create a folder from repository since a file of the same name already exists.  this was caused by a post build command where a file is supposed to be copied to a folder but the developer who checked the whole suite forgot to add the said folder in his commit resulting in the creation of a dummy file due to the issued copy command.

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Posted 08-01-2006 6:38 PM by jokiz