NTFS and invisible streams

Change to an NTFS partition on your system, and type

echo "stream message" > afile.txt:myPrivy

A file has been created named afile.txt - there is no afile.txt:myPrivy file. Now, try type afile.txt and you'll get nothing! Hmmm... If you list the folder's content's you'll notice that afile.txt has got a 0 bytes size but

more < afile.txt:myPrivy

shows that myPrivy has indeed got "stream message" in it! This is actually a little known feature of NTFS that's been there since its very first incarnation, NT 3.1, but has never been much touted by Microsoft. myPrivy is a named stream of the file, while its normal contents go to the unnamed stream and that is the stream that all applications - even dir - seem to be aware of. Have a look at this article, which appeared in Microsoft Systems Journal, November 1998. It may have been originally devised for storing thumbnails and user changes but it looks to me more suitable for trojan horses and DOS attacks or, as the authors of this article say, "for some geeky party games where you can allocate a large stream in a file on a friend's disk".

Autocomplete in Windows 2000

For some unfathomable reason, Microsoft has decided to hide the autocomplete functionality in Windows 2000 command prompt, even after applying the latest service pack. I can't help myself repeating here the excellent tip I stumbled upon here to turn that feature on:

1. Log on as Administrator,
2. Click Start, and then click Run,
3. Type Regedit and OK,
4. Double click HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,
5. Double click SOFTWARE,
6. Double click Microsoft,
7. Double click Command Processor,
8. In the right pane of Regedit, double click the 'CompletionChar' DWORD value,
9. Type 9 click OK,
10. Close Regedit,

Now every time you hit Tab cmd will go through all available folders starting with the prefix you've already typed! You can apply this change by merging the following regedit file:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor]
"EnableExtensions"=dword:00000001
"CompletionChar"=dword:00000009

your mug on stamp

Royal Mail have come up with the idea of personal first class stamps where you can have your very own face printed on them. They cost £0.7475 including postage instead of the standard .28p but that's hardly the matter. All you have to do is upload your photo online from their site and pick one of the so-called Smilers^TM. The stamps will be delivered to you. Clever.

zmee alright

Guessed correctly, zmeeagain in a white moroccan kaftan, quite naturally whilst in Marocco a couple of years ago.