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Comment by CoolCold | Hacker News Reader

Interop adds some value, i.e., from Windows side

    PS C:\Users\coolcold> netsh wlan show interfaces|wsl -- fgrep Mbps
        Receive rate (Mbps)    : 121.5
        Transmit rate (Mbps)   : 121.5

or, from WSL side, you can invoke Explorer for current folder via simple

    explorer.exe .

or notepad ..or..

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Imagine spinning up a whole Linux VM to filter some text.

In all seriousness though, is there a reason ripgrep doesn’t suffice?

>Imagine spinning up a whole browser engine just to view/edit some text

>Something something vim/emacs.

There's value in having a compatibility layer for a universal command line. Besides, even WSL2 is barely a VM

Is there a reason powershells Select-String won’t suffice?

To summarise: PowerShell is awkward.

It’s awkward when used to text pipelines, but the object oriented output is just so much nicer to parse and interact with for me that after spending some serious time with Powershell I am a huge fan. Being able to use the CLR directly and any .NET packages is killer.

IME PowerShell is superior to posix shell text parsing.

You work in an organization that allows WSL but does not allow other 3rd party downloads....

In other words, it has nothing to do with WSL as technology.

I see it in similar way to Docker extended and made it _easy_ for _end users_ to user namespaces, overlayfs, ports forwarding and distribution (docker hub), WSL/WSL2 on top of Linux solves problem of other aspects, one of them being corporate friendly (among others).

That's a really good point! WSL2 is kinda Hyper-V's 'Docker moment'.

I don't think so.

The same way of when JS dev uses docker and not giving a shit it's the whole Unix compatibile system under the hood (Linux), he just cares on getting Nginx-something from Docker Hub, effectively making Docker to be his platform of infrastructure, the same way small fraction of the crowd cares WSL2 is using Hyper-V under the hood.

If you make a poll on what kind of virtualiziation is needed to run WSL2, I bet the most used answer would be "virtua what?"

100% of the time if you are wsl user, you have it running.

On serious side, even `findstr` is enough, but goal was to show interop in action, not to choose best grep alike solution.

On other serious side, I can ensure and enforce standardization on having WSL across the teams and departments and be sure such snippets work. Standardizing on ripgrep probably doesn't worth it.

For lonely/solo/indi technician that makes no sense and ripgrep can be better of course.

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