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There's Bugs In The Windows 10 Implementation of Bash (altervista.org)

First-time submitter Big O Notation shares "an honest review about the new Ubuntu Bash" that shipped with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. While it's still officially beta, most of the commands work as expected, and it includes popular programs like the Pico text editor. Here's some of the review's highlights: Pros: You can also manage and manipulate other files inside your entire Hard Disk, even those outside of your Linux home directory.
Cons: Even if you chmod something properly, when you use ls -l the Bash would not show the correct permissions. [And] if you try to create a Folder in your Linux Home Directory by using the Windows GUI, it would be impossible to read and manage it. Don't try this at home.

Microsoft says they've included the Windows Subsystem for Linux primarily as "a tool for developers -- especially web developers and those who work on or with open source projects." One Scandinavian developer has even tried running X on Bash on Ubuntu on Windows, reporting success running simpler programs like xcalc and xclock, as well as Gnome Control Center and xeditor and SciTE. "Things start to fall apart if you try to get more ambitious, though."

4 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. cygwin by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Informative

    For now, it's still better to use Cygwin.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  2. Is this article serious? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    I have no doubt that the integration between Windows and the Ubuntu environment is bad, particularly with regards to the permissions. The POSIX vs. Windows permissions models are most likely to interact badly. There isn't a lossless mapping between the two, so something is bound to be lost. That being said, this article is absolutely horrendous.

    Example:

    2. “sudo su” VS Windows

    This useful commands doesn’t work in the Shell and if you try it you will, at first receive a command line error, and second you have to restart your terminal because the command “cd” starts to work in a random way causing path problem.

    Well, no kidding. First off, anyone who uses ‘sudo su’ instead of ‘sudo -i’ or ‘sudo bash’ should cease writing technical articles. Then there is no justification for the expectation that both sudo and su will somehow work as expected. That's the very thing I'm not expecting to operate the way I'm used to, since it is not running on a Unix-like system.

    But the absolutely best part is that the text of the whole article is completely devoid of any useful information. The quote above has the details and the grammar of the guy who calls your technical support guy and tells “my server don't work,” and refuses to give you any more details until you accidentally discover they don't have an account at your company, they don't have a server but a Facebook page, and their internet connection is presently not working.

    As I would never used Ubuntu Bash for Windows, I would have been curious to see what permissions would ‘ls -l’ see after a chmod. That detail is somehow missing from the “article”, which is a series of complaints and vain praises like “grep works correctly”. Yay.

  3. Re:Can't even match Cygwin by Darinbob · · Score: 3, Informative

    Cygwin mostly uses a thick compatibility layer that slows things down a lot but makes things really compatible with Unix, such that you need no or minimal effort to get off the shelf unix software to run under it. So it's great in the sense that you get what you expect, but it always feels just a wee bit slow.

  4. Re: Can't even match Cygwin by Billly+Gates · · Score: 3, Informative

    That's a little extreme.

    Cygwin is very outdated and uses translated calls from POSIX to win32 with all the bugs and glory on both platforms combined.

    Last I checked you couldn't run major products. Also what good is it? Everything in Windows is an object, not a text file. You cannot cat your event viewer files nor can you use awk, sed, and grep for WMI on your PC. MS is native and more apps are supported.

    This is 2016. If any geek is stuck on Windows or Linux and need an app on another platform you run a virtual machine. Let Linux be Linux and Windows be Windows. Win 10 has Hyper-V and virtual box and qemu is free on Linux.