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Linux Subsystem Files To Become Accessible via Windows File Explorer (zdnet.com)
One of Windows Subsystem for Linux's more annoying tricks is it's hard to get at your Linux files from Windows. From a report: Oh, you can do it, but you take a real chance of ruining the files. To quote Microsoft, "DO NOT, under ANY circumstances, access, create, and/or modify files in your distro's filesystem using Windows apps, tools, scripts, consoles, etc." In the forthcoming Windows 10 April 2019 Update, aka Windows 10 19H1, this Linux file problem will finally be fixed. According to Craig Loewen, a Microsoft programming manger working on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), "The next Windows update is coming soon and we're bringing exciting new updates to WSL with it! These include accessing the Linux file system from Windows, and improvements to how you manage and configure your distros in the command line."
I could access Windows files on Linux just fine. Some OSs are behind the times I guess.
It's trivially easy setting up a proper VM and doesn't cost a dime.
If you know how to use Linux, installation is nothing. If you don't, you don't need Linux or WSL.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
microsoft still hasnt explained exactly what they hope to achieve with the linux subsystem work. namely, what is it you hope to offer of value to something that you could install for free from any of more than 30 cloud providers and hundreds of VPS hosting sites? Who would actively go out of their way to add windows as a layer of complexity, and most importantly, why??
Good people go to bed earlier.
What is the big deal over WSL? There is nothing that WSL can do that I can not already do with VirtualBox and Putty with X forwarding.
https://www.howtogeek.com/112888/3-ways-to-access-your-linux-partitions-from-windows/
If Microsoft was not so focused on file system incompatibility, it would have supported EXT2,3,4 a long time ago. It also would have made NTFS more easily accessible from Linux. It also would not have encumbered its file systems with patents and extort money from everyone from TomTom to USB manufactures that interact with those systems.
Then again, let's not blame Microsoft, a faceless company. Let's blame the CEO (Ballmer) and all of the minions (Brad Smith) that made this extortion possible.
Yes, a Linux VM will need 128-256 MB of RAM. (WSL isn't competing with Gnome).
Also, we're talking about people who use *Windows*, where some dialog boxes use that much RAM by themselves.
I teach computer science at a state school. And some students laptop can not quite run VMs, for a bunch a reasons (that range from shitty hardware, to not enough memory, and through the virtualization bit got disabled in the BIOS because the constructor wanted to sell a more expensive laptop for developpers).
I had used WSL for the class. And that was a complete catastrophe. The filesystem interaction were just not working right. I am guessing it is because students went editting the file through the file explorer. But we were getting the strangest bugs.
So I have told students to absolutely use the VM and we are working around the few cases of laptops that are not quite good enough. And the clas goes fine so far.
If MS can deliver a working WSL, I may consider using it again.
Notice that all of these changes to windows are 1 way: They all provide windows access into the linux sub-systems, not the other way around... This is not an accident, and it is not in your best interests
Do not use MS products unless you want to continue your guaranteed lock in as their cash cow. You are the product, you are for sale, but you will not see a dime of the profit.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
If you haven't tried it recently, you can think of it as a lighter-weight and more complete version of WSL.
Why did Microsoft make systems paths with C:\this\slash instead of /this/slash? Deliberate incompatibility.
And VMS used [diskroot.folder.folder]. Different systems from an era where compatibility wasn't even an idea of a thing.
Why did Microsoft make their line endings different? Deliberate incompatibility.
Unix used line feed. Early Macs used carriage return. MS-DOS and VMS used carriage return and line feed - which made the most sense to me, since you could copy text files straight to a printer with no driver. All choices made long before compatibility was even a thought, let alone a goal.
News story: Microsofts deliberately broken shit, still expensive and broken. Marketing in progress.
They have, but not here. Look harder for a place to direct your MS hate.
This is actually really cool since you can interact with the Plan 9 system and do all kinds of crazy stuff. The big question will be how much can we get into that part.
Those of you that are wondering what kind of stuff, you could force the FS to only see files as lowercase, you could have it be case insensitive, you could have if be case sensitive on match and insensitive otherwise, mount remote plan 9 filesystems (good ol' grid computing). It could be a MUCH bigger deal than it seems.
For Ctrl+c for copy, you should blame Xerox P.A.R.C., not Microsoft. Actually, microsoft follows convention. In the GUI ctrl+c is for copy, while Ctrl+c in comand line is interrupt, just like in *nix. So, no "deliberate incompatibility"
About c:\folder\subfolder, you should ask the CP/M guys. You see, they used the / for parameter passing, so when MSoft decided to support folders in MS-DOS 2.0 onwards, the character was already in use. Actually, if memory serves well, there was an obscure command in early MS-DOS to change the path separator to / . Since no one used it, it was retired without much fanfare. So no "deliberate incompatibility here". As a matter of fact, at that time MSoft was selling a unix (called Xenix) and, if anything, they wanted MS-DOS and Xenix to converge, that's why they included the aforementioned obscure command.
About the line endings, as some other comentator indicated, using CR+LF together meant that you could copy a plain text file to the printer directly without further conversion. And also, dos (and windows latter), mac and *nix all had differnt ways of skinning that particular cat. And do not even ask about the complications of line separation in VMS, you will not believe it!!!. So, no "deliberte incompatibility" here.
If you want examples of deliberate incompatibility, better check your history books for things like running Windows 3.x on DR-DOS, or running lotus 123 on early versions of Windows, that sort of thing, but, the three examples you choose, don't quite cut it.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Why did Microsoft make "Ctrl-c" the keyboard shortcut for copy? Because ctrl-c on unix hard exits programs.
For Mac compatibility. The correct Windows shortcut for copy is ctrl-insert, paste is shift-insert and cut is shift-del. Try them, they still work fine, even in most Linux programs.
The slash vs backslash comes from copying CPM where slash was used for parameters and there were no subdirectories. In this day, all programs should support both slash and backslash as directory separators
MS line ending are actually more correct, a CR (carriage return) to bring the cursor to the beginning of the line and a LF (linefeed) to do a linefeed. Trying to save bytes resulted in using a linefeed as a line ending. Apple was closer where the CR as a line ending was much like a typewriter. BTW, back in the '60's, the ASCII standard was decided.to have both as EOL chars rather then a dedicated one.
The : goes back to PDP 8 where devices ended with a : such as CON: before you ask.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Sorry to be pedantic... IIRC, DOS file I/O primitives would accept either '\' or '/' as a path separator. COMMAND.COM was the issue; it would always interpret '/' as the beginning of a command-line option. If you were writing a command-line utility, it could employ "C:\path\to\my\file" or "C:/path/to/my/file". Actually, I think you could pass "C:/path\to/my\file" and that would still work. Yes, there was an internal variable inside DOS that recorded the option character; I think it was "SWITCHAR", and you could alter it in your environment (e.g. AUTOEXEC.BAT). Setting "SWITCHAR=-" meant that COMMAND.COM options now begin with '-', like UN*X. This took effect on the command-line, and inside .BAT files. But now your .BAT files are incompatible with everybody else's system...
Oh, yeah. I think CP/M copied the "/option" convention from DEC's RSTS.
They didn't. That was Wordperfect. In MS DOS and MSBASIC before it ^C means break, just like it does in Unix.
Quite the opposite. When MS DOS first came out, it didn't support subdirectories (each disk just had a root directory.) The designer (MS DOS was bought, not written, by Microsoft) chose to use "/" as a prefix for options to DOS commands (for example "DIR /W") - similar to, for example, DCL
When MS DOS 2.0 came out Microsoft added subdirectories. They chose backslash because it was the nearest thing they had available to regular slashes, but slashes were already used by legacy software to indicate command line options. There's supposedly a switch you can throw that flips the meaning of backslashes and slashes, but it wasn't default because MS DOS 2.0 was supposed to be compatible with MS DOS 1.x. I don't know if it still exists in NT based operating systems, my guess is not.
Anyway, the reason Microsoft wanted slashes, and wanted to make them at least available, is because for a time the "high end" OS it wanted to push was its own version of Unix, Xenix. So, actually, yes they did want to use the same format, they just couldn't make it default.
No, deliberate compatibility. At the time MS DOS was written, the "standard" operating system was CP/M. MS DOS contained some features designed to make it easy to live in a CP/M world. This included a similar API, making it easier for CP/M software to be ported. But they also adopted, wholesale, the format for CP/M text files, which are: plain ASCII, CR+LF for EOL, and ^Z for EOF.
FWIW Bear in mind both (let's forget the ^C thing given you're wrong, cmd.exe treats ^C as break too) of the decisions you're criticizing that aren't false were made before 1982, when Unix was something most people ran on minicomputers, was still relatively obscure, and when the company that was doing the most to try to make it available for PCs was... Microsoft.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Switchchar was the eviroment variable for DR-DOS. In MS-DOS the procedure was different, but the idea was the same. Do not feel bad though. I can't remember how it was done in DOS either, It has been a looong time.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
I assume they mean ReiserFS. It's the "killer app" for Linux.
Linux Subsystem Files To Become Accessible via Windows File Explorer
with:
Windows Malware Now Gets Access to Linux Files as Well
MSYS2 is the better WSL.
No problems with filesystems, does not break Windows update, perfect integration, pacman package manager.
No ELF, but never missed it, pacman brings all the good tools.
I once compared WSL and MSYS2 git checkout times. Practically equal. ..
Then I compared Ubuntu in VirtualBox and WSL. The latter 20-fold slower. Until I excluded the folder from Security Essentials scanning
> Why bother with that unnecessary nonsense?
My use case may be different, but sometimes I like to do weird things, like open a file. Microsoft says WSL will destroy my files if I do that. I have no problems opening files in either Windows or Linux when using Virtualbox.
I happen to have 256MB available, maybe you don't. People with only 512MB of physical memory probably don't want to use Virtualbox. Or Windows.
I do have a machine running some Perl scripts on Windows which were designed for Linux. We've been using Cygwin. WSL might be a good option for that.
Originally, the CR came before LF for the following reason. Teletypes, at 10 char/sec, could complete an LF in 1/10 sec, but a CR could take up to 1/5 sec. It was 100% mechanical, with no buffering. With the CR issued first, both would complete in 1/5 sec, ready to print the first character on the new line.
Good point. All (or most?) of the CTRL characters were about controlling the printer and probably go back to before computers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
It doesnâ(TM)t use hyper-v. Itâ(TM)s not a VM.
Not at all the same thing in WSL. Let me quote the summary for you, and then explain further:
"DO NOT, under ANY circumstances, access, create, and/or modify files in your distro's filesystem using Windows apps, tools, scripts, consoles, etc." says Microsoft.
Here's the next sentence from MSDN:
Creating/changing Linux files from Windows will likely result in data corruption and/or damage your Linux environment requiring you to uninstall & reinstall your distro!
The issue is that creating a file or opening a file from Windows, without ever touching it from Linux, frequently damages the directory that it is. (Directory means "folder", for the Windows folks"). So saving a new text file inside of /usr makes all of /usr inaccessible and you have to reinstall the OS.
WSL is a cool idea. Not quite ready from prime time, it seems.
So there are two possibilities here. Either:
A) Microsoft is horribly wrong, and is strongly warning people about a major problem with their software that doesn't actually exist.
B) Your first guess when you soon the summary wasn't quite right. Once you got an idea, you refuse to learn any new information because that would mean you were DUN DUN DUN wrong! Omg that's not possible that you don't already know everything!
Here's the thing, all of us had to learn how to count, and how to use the potty. We weren't born knowing everything, and now of us knows everything today. *We all already know* that you don't know everything. Trying to pretend you know everything is futile. Nobody will fall for it. Even on this bug specifically, trying to pretend you know better than Microsoft is futile, we ALL know better. The *only* way you can look good or look stupid is this -
Your response to new information tells us whether you are smart (capable of learning new things) or purposefully ignorant (refusng to learn from new information). The only way to look smart is here is to say "oh, okay, I really that wrong the first time".
There is zero chance you're going to convince anyone that Microsoft is shipping an update to fix a major bug that doesn't exist. You can only convince us that you are able to process new information and learn, or that you aren't able to.
You have to be like me. How big of an idiot are you?