i gave this answer to a duplicate, and thought i'd post it here for your reference:
as previously stated. it's a reserved word from back in MS-DOS, for the CONsole device (as far as i can remember). but, you can force windows/dos to create the folder for you. for devices, it uses the format \\.\[RESERVED_WORD]
to access the "file" (these devices used files for communication). to force windows to create your folder, instead of doing mkdir [RESERVED_WORD]
, do the following:
mkdir \\.\[absolute path to folder of choice, including drive letter]\[RESERVED_WORD]
for example, to create CON folder on my desktop,
mkdir \\.\C:\Users\me\Desktop\CON
to delete the folder, you have to reference it the same way, or else it won't work.
rmdir \\.\C:\Users\me\Desktop\CON
my advice though is to just use a different name. it would be very difficult to always refer to it via its absolute path, especially if you are developing an app you plan on deploying.