Bash in Windows 10 : Ten Facts You Must Know

Bash in Windows : Learn about top 10 must know facts for use and setting the expectation right.  Based on Ubuntu Linux – Window 10 contains Ubuntu user-mode image allowing to run command line utilities same way as in native Ubuntu.

1. Run Bash scripts  as in Linux –  Linux command-line tools like sed, awk, grep, and tools like Ruby, Git, Python, etc. directly on Windows.
2. Access Windows files –  You can also access your Windows filesystem from within Bash allowing you to work on the same set of files using Windows or Linux tools.
3. Not a server platform – but rather a developer tool set. This is not a server platform upon which you will host websites, run server infrastructure,
4. Can’t interact with  Windows applications and tools –   Bash and Linux tools cannot interact with  Windows applications and tools  and vice-versa, you can’t open notepad or paint application in bash or open git or Ruby in Windows.
5. Just a beta software – Most of the core utility and commands will  work but there may be cases that some of these may not work as expected or don’t work at all.
6. Ubuntu Executable Linkable Format(ELF) binaries – unlike Cygwin where open source utilities are recompiled from source to run natively in Windows,  Ubuntu ELF binaries run  directly in Windows.”
7. Linux syscalls to Windows OS syscalls translations –  Windows Subsystem for Linux perform real time translation of Linux system calls into Windows OS system calls. This is not new implementation, Windows NT POSIX subsystem was also designed to run native Unix binaries on Windows NT.
8. No virtualization or recompilation – Users can simply types “bash” or “ubuntu”  at start  to get in  Ubuntu shell, with access to all of Ubuntu and most of Apt ( Advanced Package Tool) running natively.
9. Azure Connection –  Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution in Azure cloud. It becomes much easier to write code using vim, Visual Studio,emacs ,  and push it to the cloud instance with git, scp, or rsync.

Windows 10 Anniversary Update – Bash in windows 10 will be available  in Windows anniversary update in 2016 summer