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."

Comments

Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

I could access Windows files on Linux just fine. Some OSs are behind the times I guess.

Education use cases

[godrik]

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.

one way

[geoskd]

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.

Re:Deliberate incompatibility

[williamyf]

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.

Re:Cygwin already did better.

[cdwiegand]

Hahaha. Wow... really? you know that WSL comes with full, real distros, like Ubuntu, right? Cygwin still doesn't have a command line way to install packages. No apt-get install anything, or (ugh) rpm -ivh some.rpm. Updates are non-trivial, you have to use a GUI, instead of just do-release-upgrade (or whatever Suse/Redhat/etc. use). Give me WSL any day of the week over Cygwin.