Sometimes, but mainly for website development I want to use a Linux machine. I don’t want to buy another machine to install Linux on, or create a Virtual Machine on my Windows machine. I simply want to run most Linux command-line tools, utilities, and applications — directly on Windows.
Luckily for me I found this description on the Microsoft documentation web site. That documentation will help you get through the installation process. You can define your own Linux distro, you can choose a dsitro from the Windows Store. After setting up a Windows sub system for Linux, the documentation continues to describe how to add users.
The interoperablility part shows some usefull examples:
- Run Linux tools from a Windows command line
- Run Windows tools from WSL
- Share environment variables between Windows and WSL
Code example
C:\temp> bash -c "ls -la" | findstr foo
C:\temp> dir | bash -c "grep foo"
C:\temp> bash -c "ls -la" > out.txt