Credit: Sandra Henry-Stocker The fairly recent appearance of bash on Windows, more properly known as “bash on Ubuntu on Windows” gives Windows some special appeal to those of us who love living on the command line. And it’s not just bash, but bash along with all the tools you’re likely to be looking for to get your work done. Jumping in I have to admit that, during my first few hours, it felt a little strange to be typing Unix commands while running Windows 10. Even so, the command line was obviously so much more powerful and familiar than using PowerShell, that it was also quite exciting. These hours reminded me what it felt like when I first started working from home on the desktop of a system that sat in a data center at work (several hours away) or when I discovered that I could enjoy a glass of my favorite beer while watching a movie at a local movie theater — all good things, but sufficiently disconcerting to make me do a quick double take. Wow, it actually works. Using bash on a Windows desktop feels more than a little strange. The bash command line is provided through something called “WSL” — the Windows Subsystem for Linux — and is meant to support developers who rely on tools like sed, awk, and grep. The installation requires that you be using the Windows 10 Anniversary Edition on a 64-bit system and you have to switch to developer mode, but the installation is incredibly easy to do. One reboot later and your Windows system will never quite be the same. Test driving When you first open your bash terminal window, you’ll be prompted to set up a user account by entering a username and password. Then it’s time to jump in and see what it feels like to work on the command line. Keep in mind that this is not the same as using a live distribution; you’re going to be running native Linux commands directoy on Windows and creating and editing files on your hard drive. Look for the “bash on Ubuntu on Windows” option in your command menu. Once you open the tool, you should find yourself in your new Linux home directory. shs@WINDOWS-3B67H60:~$ pwd /home/shs Don’t like the prompt? No problem, you know how to fix that. Edit your .bashrc file and add a PS1 setting such as PS1=”$ “. Then source the file (. .bashrc) or restart your bash window. $ pwd /home/shs $ whoami shs Run a few commands and you’ll start to sense the familiarity of this Linux environment. Check the date/time setting. Touch a file and look at the permissions and everything looks fairly normal. $ date Thu Mar 16 10:25:43 DST 2017 $ touch myfile $ ls -l total 0 -rw-rw-rw- 1 shs shs 0 Mar 16 10:18 myfile And, of course, you can edit the file with vi. What else can you do? As you might expect, you can switch to the root account using the sudo command. $ which sudo /usr/bin/sudo $ sudo su - sudo: unable to resolve host WINDOWS-3B67H60 [sudo] password for shs: root@WINDOWS-3B67H60:~# pwd /root Clearly not everything is working properly quite yet. We get an “unable to resolve host” error and the who command (shown below) provides no response at all, but most of the commands that you’d use frequently on the command line are looking quite good. $ who $ whoami shs check this $ ls /bin bash kmod plymouth bunzip2 less plymouth-upstart-bridge busybox lessecho ps bzcat lessfile pwd bzcmp lesskey rbash bzdiff lesspipe readlink bzegrep ln red bzexe loadkeys rm bzfgrep login rmdir bzgrep loginctl rnano bzip2 lowntfs-3g running-in-container bzip2recover ls run-parts bzless lsblk sed bzmore lsmod setfont cat mkdir setupcon chgrp mknod sh chmod mktemp sh.distrib chown more sleep chvt mount ss cp mountpoint static-sh cpio mt stty dash mt-gnu su date mv sync dbus-cleanup-sockets nano tailf dbus-daemon nc tar dbus-uuidgen nc.openbsd tempfile dd netcat touch df netstat true dir nisdomainname udevadm dmesg ntfs-3g ulockmgr_server dnsdomainname ntfs-3g.probe umount domainname ntfs-3g.secaudit uname dumpkeys ntfs-3g.usermap uncompress echo ntfscat unicode_start ed ntfsck vdir egrep ntfscluster which false ntfscmp whiptail fgconsole ntfsdump_logfile ypdomainname fgrep ntfsfix zcat findmnt ntfsinfo zcmp fuser ntfsls zdiff fusermount ntfsmftalloc zegrep grep ntfsmove zfgrep gunzip ntfstruncate zforce gzexe ntfswipe zgrep gzip open zless hostname openvt zmore ip pidof znew kbd_mode ping kill ping6 And, yes, you’ll have man pages for your commands. You can also perform system updates. $ sudo apt-get update sudo: unable to resolve host WINDOWS-3B67H60 [sudo] password for shs: Get:1 http://security.ubuntu.com trusty-security InRelease [65.9 kB] Ign http://archive.ubuntu.com trusty InRelease Get:2 http://archive.ubuntu.com trusty-updates InRelease [65.9 kB] Get:3 http://security.ubuntu.com trusty-security/main amd64 Packages [594 kB] Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com trusty-backports InRelease Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com trusty Release.gpg ... The expected access permissions work as expected. $ cd /root bash: cd: /root: Permission denied $ sudo su - sudo: unable to resolve host WINDOWS-3B67H60 root@WINDOWS-3B67H60:~# pwd /root root@WINDOWS-3B67H60:~# ls -l total 0 root@WINDOWS-3B67H60:~# ls -l /bin total 9792 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1021112 Oct 7 2014 bash -rwxr-xr-x 3 root root 31152 Oct 21 2013 bunzip2 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1918032 Nov 14 2013 busybox ... Windows from the Linux command line Slide over to /mnt/c and you’ll be looking at your Windows system from the Linux point of view. $ cd /mnt/c $ ls -l ls: cannot access hiberfil.sys: Permission denied ls: cannot access pagefile.sys: Permission denied ls: cannot access swapfile.sys: Permission denied total 528 drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 0 Feb 13 14:16 360SANDBOX drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 0 Dec 15 10:12 $360Section -r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 395268 Jul 10 2015 bootmgr -r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 1 Oct 30 2015 BOOTNXT drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 0 Apr 8 2016 dell -????????? ? ? ? ? ? hiberfil.sys drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 0 Apr 27 2016 Logs drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 0 Apr 8 2016 MININT -????????? ? ? ? ? ? pagefile.sys d--------- 2 root root 0 Jul 16 2016 PerfLogs drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 0 Mar 14 09:21 ProgramData dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Mar 5 09:41 Program Files dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Mar 5 09:42 Program Files (x86) drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 0 Jan 17 15:24 Python34 d--------- 2 root root 0 Sep 22 02:41 Recovery drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 0 Aug 11 2016 $Recycle.Bin -????????? ? ? ? ? ? swapfile.sys d--------- 2 root root 0 Mar 14 09:17 System Volume Information dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Sep 22 02:42 Users dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Mar 15 18:05 Windows Clearly bash doesn’t have much to say about Windows’ .sys files, but we can dig a bit further. You can always wind your way over to your Windows home directory and use Linux commands on your Windows files although here you’ll see some additional oddities. Your Windows files don’t belong to your Linux user. Instead, they appear to belong to root. $ pwd /mnt/c/Users/bugfa/Desktop $ cat link.txt This is a file one two three four $ od -bc link.txt 0000000 124 150 151 163 040 151 163 040 141 040 146 151 154 145 015 012 T h i s i s a f i l e r n 0000020 157 156 145 015 012 164 167 157 015 012 164 150 162 145 145 015 o n e r n t w o r n t h r e e r 0000040 012 146 157 165 162 015 012 n f o u r r n 0000047 $ ls -l link.txt -rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 39 Mar 15 11:15 link.txt Wrap-Up Much more exploration is possible, but the gist is this. Microsoft’s adoption of Linux tools onto Windows — now roughly a year since its original introduction — brings Linux commands within easy reach of Windows users and gives open source a claim to some interesting new territory. 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