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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."
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."
That "review" is tiny and doesn't really tell you much. It doesn't even say what happens if you do mess with the Linux subsystem directories from Windows apart from "it would be impossible to read and manage it". Grats for random guy getting a ton of ad hits on a crappy 5 minute blog post. Woo.
So basically MS's Linux subsystem can't even do the job Cygwin does quite nicely? I think MS ought to go and read the code, learn some lessons and carry it back. It's not like you can't translate Unix permissions to Windows' permissions system and vice-versa, the code's even right there to read.
For now, it's still better to use Cygwin.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
MS has stated that this is very new and very buggy but that they are working on it. It is not yet for public consumption. MS has been embracing Open source minus the extinguish part for some time now. Linux (okay so not the kernel but still) on Windows outside of a virtual machine is everything a lot of people have wanted but never thought would happen. Go watch some of the MS demo videos. As a Linux user since 1996, I can attest that there is absolutely nothing that will make the broader Linux crowd happy. Hence, most of the Linux crowd are not actual techies.
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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.
It doesn't seem like much of a surprise that starting a fight between POSIX and NT ACLs is going to end badly; but this 'review' fails pretty dramatically at answering the question of how much of a problem this is.
If you can't, in practice, let the Linux side touch the Windows side, or vice versa, lest ugly and inscrutable things happen, then you might as well just run a VM. If you can actually do a variety of interesting things across systems, so long as you avoid a few edge cases, that is potentially more useful.
There are bugs in a beta? What a shock!
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
The summary even states that Microsoft still officially consider it beta software. This is not even a v1.0 release.
What we are seeing here however is that even a large ship such as Microsoft can turn very slowly. This would have been unthinkable even 5 years ago - just think what it will be like in another 5 years...
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Apparently Microsoft released it to the public.
Time will tell.
This tends to confirm the view that the GNU/Linux misnaming as "Linux" is really about denying credit where credit is due (particularly noteworthy amongst people who are sticklers for technical accuracy and in need of a clearer distinction for what one has). This project includes some parts of a system but without the Linux kernel and yet you're still giving that project credit. What Microsoft has released might be a GNU/kWindows (akin in naming to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, meaning GNU running atop the kernel of some other system—Microsoft Windows or FreeBSD, respectively) but whatever it is, it is certainly not "Linux" and it contains no Linux kernel code. Also, Cygwin has delivered some variant of comparable functionality for years.
Digital Citizen
When you can simply install actual proper Linux in a free VM like VMware Player or Virtualbox, there's really no reason to mess around with this stuff unless you're actually using it specifically for what Microsoft suggests you should use it for. Cygwin is better for just providing a Unixlike environment on Windows if that's what you want, and a VM is still better for compatibility if that's what you need.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"