Do not change Linux files using Windows apps and tools

devblogs.microsoft.com

4 points·soheilpro··6 comments

Maybe a more accurate title would be "... using MICROSOFT apps and tools"

Non-Microsoft Windows tools like notepad2 and notepad++ handle unix line-endings just fine.

Why do Microsoft's Windows apps refuse to handle them?

The issue isn't the line endings. As the linked article points out, the issue is around file-locking and that Windows cannot correctly handle Linux file metadata (permissions, owner, etc.)

Don't know and that used to drive me crazy. It's I knew it was a windows user because of the carriage return. Also encoding would be a nightmare as well.

Out of date. I don't have the reference handy, but you can now modify wsl files from Windows as long as you access them via the \\wsl$\[distro]\ path.

From build 1903 onwards they have implemented a Styx/9P file server which the windows client can use to modify linux files: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/whats-new-for-wsl...

I will be interested to see if they have managed to fix the irritatingly slow I/O with this too.

> I will be interested to see if they have managed to fix the irritatingly slow I/O with this too

Is it worse than accessing the files directly from wsl? I certainly found that on the slow side. Though from what I've read on the topic (notably https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425...) incremental improvements might be all that's ever possible given Windows' current I/O stack.

It's one of the annoyances that drove me back to Linux. That's in turn equally irritating in different ways, which will probably drive me back to Windows.

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