What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console • Hacker News Board

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#11

Post by badminton1 » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 6:23 AM UTC

laumars wrote: post #9

badminton1 wrote: post #3

Bash for Windows... Bash is a Unix shell. Linux is an operating system. Completely different concepts. Bash on Windows has existed for decades now, through Cygwin. https://cygwin.com/cgi-bin2/package-cat.cgi?file=x86_64%2Fba... Trying to reduce the entire GNU/Linux ecosystem to "Bash" is insulting to the community you are trying to appeal to: Linux is an immensely large and complex project, which has millions of line…

Your entry point to WSL is bash and while you may be able to compile and install other shells, calling it "bash" isn't too far from the truth. Really the awkwardness of the naming is more of a testament to the power of scripting on Unix-like OSs (eg how scripting is a first class citizen and how most of the ecosystem is modelled around CLI, and thus scripting, support) more than it is an insult. As for cygwin, that w…

EDIT: Your choice of shell can be something different than bash... you opt to use zsh or fish or another shell. Therefore saying "Bash for Windows" can be objectively said to be unnecessarily confusing/inaccurate.

I think Cygwin was less convenient than an ABI such as WSL, but by no means "terrible". Cygwin was initially released around 1995, it served a valuable purpose before the first VM products came along.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#12

Post by xienze » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 6:25 AM UTC

Only thing I wish they could do is make calling Linux programs from Windows a bit more natural. Yeah "bash -c" works, but it's not exactly ideal.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#13

Post by Osiris » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 6:26 AM UTC

struppi wrote: post #5

Ok, this is awesome, if everything works as advertised. I have been mostly a Linux user for quite some time - at least on my own computer, clients always have Windows. But this year I bought a Surface Pro as a secondary device. I first evaluated WSL and really liked it, but I switched to Hyper+Git Bash because networking in node.js was not working properly, and because I could not start Windows programs from the comm…

I recently tried starting Windows CLI programs from within bash and it worked just fine, but you have to specify the entire filename, like "./notepad.exe".

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#14

Post by dcw303 » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 6:28 AM UTC

The inotify implementation looks very promising! Editing source files in a Windows-native IDE and having changes picked up by, say, node.js is a great workflow.

I'm yet to try it out, but I wonder if the problems with editing files in the linux filesystem[0] is going to be an issue with this?

[0]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/11/17/do-n...

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#15

Post by vesinisa » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 6:29 AM UTC

badminton1 wrote: post #3

Bash for Windows... Bash is a Unix shell. Linux is an operating system. Completely different concepts. Bash on Windows has existed for decades now, through Cygwin. https://cygwin.com/cgi-bin2/package-cat.cgi?file=x86_64%2Fba... Trying to reduce the entire GNU/Linux ecosystem to "Bash" is insulting to the community you are trying to appeal to: Linux is an immensely large and complex project, which has millions of line…

^ Don't feed the troll.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#16

Post by mankash666 » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 6:29 AM UTC

The interop opens up new possibilities.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#17

Post by finchisko » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 6:32 AM UTC

>Upgrade In-Place ...though this may not result in an optimal instance.

Wondering why such a disclaimer? Ubuntu apt upgrades are reliable. Or is it related to WSL? Anyway good job WSL team.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#18

Post by cpdt » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 6:32 AM UTC

xienze wrote: post #12

Only thing I wish they could do is make calling Linux programs from Windows a bit more natural. Yeah "bash -c" works, but it's not exactly ideal.

I made a small project back when WSL was new to help tackle this, called Slinky: https://github.com/cpdt/slinky/

It allows you to run a command in the Windows prompt to 'link' a Linux command to a Windows one, allowing you to run the Windows command to run the Linux command (if that makes sense; the GIF in the Readme is probably better at explaining).

It's written in Bash and Batch so doesn't require external dependencies.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#19

Post by mankash666 » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 6:35 AM UTC

badminton1 wrote: post #11

laumars wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your entry point to WSL is bash and while you may be able to compile and install other shells, calling it "bash" isn't too far from the truth. Really the awkwardness of the naming is more of a testament to the power of scripting on Unix-like OSs (eg how scripting is a first class citizen and how most of the ecosystem is modelled around CLI, and thus scripting, support) more than it is an insult. As for cygwin, that w…

EDIT: Your choice of shell can be something different than bash... you opt to use zsh or fish or another shell. Therefore saying "Bash for Windows" can be objectively said to be unnecessarily confusing/inaccurate. I think Cygwin was less convenient than an ABI such as WSL, but by no means "terrible". Cygwin was initially released around 1995, it served a valuable purpose before the first VM products came along.

I am amazed that you started at all. Given your fascination with personal attacks

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#20

Post by laumars » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 6:36 AM UTC

aerovistae wrote: post #4

badminton1 wrote: post #3

Bash for Windows... Bash is a Unix shell. Linux is an operating system. Completely different concepts. Bash on Windows has existed for decades now, through Cygwin. https://cygwin.com/cgi-bin2/package-cat.cgi?file=x86_64%2Fba... Trying to reduce the entire GNU/Linux ecosystem to "Bash" is insulting to the community you are trying to appeal to: Linux is an immensely large and complex project, which has millions of line…

Microsoft adds this amazing set of features and the only response you have is "your name is insulting the people you're trying to appeal to"? "Trying"? As if they're failing? Do you know how much people love this project?

A lot of resistance some will have to WSL will be old battle scars from Microsofts past behaviour. Microsoft have done a lot over the years to troll the Linux community. While many of the younger HN members will be familiar with the "new open source Microsoft" some of us oldies have had to endure IE breaking the web plus ActiveX / Silverlight and other MS web lockins. Comments like "open source is communism" from top MS execs. Fragmentation of Java (which eventually spawned into .NET but there were years of pain before .NET became a thing of beauty). To be honest more sins than i have time to list. So many of us are now cynical by default with regards to MS.

Take WSL for example, I'm sure their motives are just to encourage people away from Linux and OSX for sysadmin and dev workstations. I can see that strategy working for many people too. But at least with WSL, if they do decide to cripple it once they have the customer base then it's pretty trivial for users to switch away again (which was less doable with many of the other tech they've dominated the market place with).

So while the trolling remarks of the OP are clearly unconstructive, i can at least emphasise with why he feels the need to speak out against MS. He just did so in a pretty lousy way.