2008-04-28 13:17:59
Awesome Hidden Windows Feature
And by awesome, I mean totally _not_ awesome. A co-worker just called me over to his desk to check out some odd behavior. He had just extracted a zip file that contained a "Complete Web Site."When you right click on a page and choose "Save As," you have the choice of saving the HTML only or the Complete Web Site, which will include all images, CSS, etc. A friend saved a page with the "Complete" option, zipped it, and sent it to my co-worker. He unzipped it to find two items: index.html and index_files (a directory). That's normal, we've seen that before. Since my co-worker only needed the HTML, he decided to cut and paste the HTML file to another directory, but when he did the folder automagically followed.
That's right, the folder was moved without any user interaction. We thought that Windows may have somehow linked the folder to the HTML file since it was saved using the "Complete" method. To test this theory, he deleted index.html and guess what happened. That's right, the index_files folder was automagically deleted. What an awesome feature. So if you've named any of your folders the same as an HTML file with "_files" on the end, you may lose your files.
Thank you Microsoft for screwing up basic file and folder management. The entire world appreciates it!
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2 comments
2008-06-03 08:23:20
slonkak says...
If by "setting" you mean a well hidden registry entry, then yes.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER
Software
Microsoft
Windows
CurrentVersion
Explorer
NoFileFolderConnection=dword:00000001
That seems like something that A) shouldn't be enabled by default and B) should be togglable through a control panel applet. My point still stands, Microsoft screwed up because they thought people are too dumb to know what files that _actually_ want to delete.
2008-06-03 07:53:52
Markus says...
There's a setting that prevents/enables this in the windows explorer. It's been there for ages.