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Cygwin gives you (seamless) access to the Windows file system. Is it possible to (say) 'sed ... | wc' a file in the host's directories from a VM?

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yes. for example in virtual box you can mount host's directory tree within the vm either in rw/ro mode. from then on, things are seamless.

For certain definitions of seamless. Windows has a habit of messing up nix file permissions and sometimes things just don't work at all unless you do it on the Windows side.

I thought Windows' default filesystem (NFS?) was not safely writeable from Linux. Does your method involve changing Windows' filesystem?

Windows default filesystem is NTFS and it's pretty safe to write. I certainly wouldn't set up something like a server which relies on this, but for personal use or even a development workstation I think it's fine.

I guess it might be a good idea to first check the disk using Windows after something like a power loss while the NTFS partition is mounted. But apparently NTFS-3G (one of the NTFS drivers) can also use the journal to recover the filesystem after a power loss.

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