/dev/null on Windows

I was trying to run Apache ZooKeeper on Windows the other day. Getting it to run was super easy. I was more interested in running it without any file/snapshot logging.

I did ask around in the forums and I thought letting the "dataDir" directory to point to "/dev/null" would solve the problem. But being a (ahem) Windows user I couldn't quite get the "/dev/null" to work. In Windows the equivalent is "nul" but it doesn't quite work when you try to use it from Java. Some operations work, but some don't.

[Update 1:
Strangely getAbsolutePath() prepends the current directory's path but the file does not get created.
Creating nul:\abc.log throws an exception. But nul:abc.log does not and Java says its absolute path is d:\dump\nul:abc.log but the file is not there. Which means that it is indeed writing to the "null" device. I wonder what I'm missing.]

As usual, the full code is here: http://gist.github.com/484116


Here's the output and it shows what works and what doesn't: