something strange about Win-XP's command shell

Question

I wrote the following command in windows XP's command shell and something strange happened:

C:\Folder1> copy sample.txt :

Because of my typing mistake, I wrote ":" instead of "D:"

... but it copied the sample.txt to somewhere I cant find!

I searched my whole HDD for sample.txt but the only instance of this file is the original one which is in C:\Folder1.

Do you know where ":" path actually is in Win-XP command shell?

You might say ":" is current path and the file has been copied onto itself but look at this:

If you run that command for the first time, this will be the result:

1 file copied.

but the next time you run that command it will ask you:

overwrite sample.txt? (yes/no/all)

So if it were writing the file onto itself, both results would have to be the same but they aren't.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

Your data was copied into a NTFS Alternate Data Stream attached to the current directory.

There are tools (e.g. ADSRevealer) that would allow you to verify that . has now indeed an ADS attached.

If you type:

MORE < :sample.txt

you will retrieve the copy of sample.txt.

For more information see e.g. here. Keep in mind that command line support for ADS in XP is 'immature' at best.