Ask HN: Is Bash for Windows good enough to replace a Linux/Mac terminal? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Is Bash for Windows good enough to replace a Linux/Mac terminal?

#51

Post by bitcrazed » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 1:49 AM UTC

eswat wrote: post #21

My experience and usecase is limited - I just use my Windows machine for game development - but I’ve dealt with more headaches trying to get Bash for Windows + git to play nice with Unity that I’ve just gone back to using Git for Windows and its bash exe. Probably the weirdest problem I’ve ran into are shader files in my git repo being locked to requiring administrative rights for either Unity or Bash for Windows to…

@eswat : So long as your shader files are stored in a non-protected folder (e.g. C:\Windows, C:\Program Files, etc.), you shouldn't need Admin rights to load them.

Re: Ask HN: Is Bash for Windows good enough to replace a Linux/Mac terminal?

#52

Post by bitcrazed » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 1:51 AM UTC

jbb555 wrote: post #33

What exactly are people using the linux shell for? It's fun, but given that you can't easily access windows files and you can't use it to run things like the visual C++ compiler you can't easily use it to script windows programs. What do people actually use it for?

Bash Windows interop arrived in build #14951: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/10/19/inte... allowing you to call Windows apps from within bash, and capture and process the output of Bash scripts and/or Linux tools from Windows.

What else can you use Bash for? Using apt-get to install your favorite dev tools, libraries, platforms and languages inc. node.js, Ruby, Python, gcc, go, Rust, htop, Apache, MySQL, Jekyll, etc., and then building and running your code with little/no change vs. running on Linux natively.

Re: Ask HN: Is Bash for Windows good enough to replace a Linux/Mac terminal?

#53

Post by bitcrazed » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 1:56 AM UTC

LifeQuestioner wrote: post #9

ars_nihili wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can also intall cygwin in windows which gives you a terminal on windows. Although there may be be a better program now than cygwin Yes, like WSL, which OP is asking.

Nothing wrong with broadening an answer, no need to be black and white. Cygwin has been around for ages.

There's a big difference between Cygwin and Bash on Windows though: Cygwin is a Win32 port of the GNU tools, whereas Bash on Windows is a Linux kernel emulation layer that allows you to run unmodified Linux binaries directly on Windows.