PuTTY semi-bug win-com10

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summary: Make access to serial ports above COM9 easier on Windows
class: semi-bug: This might or might not be a bug, depending on your precise definition of what a bug is.
difficulty: fun: Just needs tuits, and not many of them.
priority: high: This should be fixed in the next release.
present-in: 0.59
fixed-in: r7345 2007-03-01 (0.60)

In PuTTY 0.59, if you need to use a serial port other than COM1 to COM9 inclusive, you have to add the magic prefix \\.\ (for instance, \\.\COM10) - a fact not included in the 0.59 documentation (although we added it shortly afterwards). The same goes for more exotically named serial ports or similar entities.

After a suitable amount of soul-searching, it seems that it would not be unreasonable for PuTTY to automatically prepend \\.\ to the serial-line string. (This works even for the traditional serial ports like COM1 - tested as far back as Win95.)

As a get-out in case someone finds something interesting to talk to that doesn't start with \\.\, we'll avoid adding the prefix iff the serial line string contains a backslash. (This will also mean that existing \\.\COM10 style configurations will continue to work.)

Audit trail for this semi-bug.

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(last revision of this bug record was at 2007-03-01 15:12:55 +0000)