Windows路径命名

碰到CreateFileA的如下调用，对该路径不解，故MSDN中获得答案（http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa365247(v=vs.85).aspx）。

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Win32 Device Namespaces
The "\\.\" prefix will access the Win32 device namespace instead of the Win32 file namespace. This is how access to physical disks and volumes is accomplished directly, without going through the file system, if the API supports this type of access. You can access many devices other than disks this way (using the CreateFile and DefineDosDevice functions, for example).

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该前缀（"\\.\"）是Win32驱动的命名空间。

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Most APIs won't support "\\.\"; only those that are designed to work with the device namespace will recognize it. Always check the reference topic for each API to be sure.

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而NT命名空间下，可以用"\Device\Xxx"取代，如下介绍：

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NT Namespaces

There are also APIs that allow the use of the NT namespace convention, but the Windows Object Manager makes that unnecessary in most cases. To illustrate, it is useful to browse the Windows namespaces in the system object browser using the Windows Sysinternals WinObj tool. When you run this tool, what you see is the NT namespace beginning at the root, or "\". The subfolder called "Global??" is where the Win32 namespace resides. Named device objects reside in the NT namespace within the "Device" subdirectory. Here you may also find Serial0 and Serial1, the device objects representing the first two COM ports if present on your system. A device object representing a volume would be something like "HarddiskVolume1", although the numeric suffix may vary. The name "DR0" under subdirectory "Harddisk0" is an example of the device object representing a disk, and so on.

To make these device objects accessible by Windows applications, the device drivers create a symbolic link (symlink) in the Win32 namespace, "Global??", to their respective device objects. For example, COM0 and COM1 under the "Global??" subdirectory are simply symlinks to Serial0 and Serial1, "C:" is a symlink to HarddiskVolume1, "Physicaldrive0" is a symlink to DR0, and so on. Without a symlink, a specified device "Xxx" will not be available to any Windows application using Win32 namespace conventions as described previously. However, a handle could be opened to that device using any APIs that support the NT namespace absolute path of the format "\Device\Xxx".

With the addition of multi-user support via Terminal Services and virtual machines, it has further become necessary to virtualize the system-wide root device within the Win32 namespace. This was accomplished by adding the symlink named "GLOBALROOT" to the Win32 namespace, which you can see in the "Global??" subdirectory of the WinObj browser tool previously discussed, and can access via the path "\\?\GLOBALROOT". This prefix ensures that the path following it looks in the true root path of the system object manager and not a session-dependent path.

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