Developers can run Bash Shell and user-mode Ubuntu Linux binaries on Windows 10

Hanselman.com ^ | 3/30/2016 | Scott Hanselman

[Scutter]

Today at BUILD in the Day One keynote Kevin Gallo announced that you can now run "Bash on Ubuntu on Windows." This is a new developer feature included in a Windows 10 "Anniversary" update (coming soon). It lets you run native user-mode Linux shells and command-line tools unchanged, on Windows.

This isn't Bash or Ubuntu running in a VM. This is a real native Bash Linux binary running on Windows itself. It's fast and lightweight and it's the real binaries. This is an genuine Ubuntu image on top of Windows with all the Linux tools I use like awk, sed, grep, vi, etc. It's fast and it's lightweight. The binaries are downloaded by you - using apt-get - just as on Linux, because it is Linux. You can apt-get and download other tools like Ruby, Redis, emacs, and on and on. This is brilliant for developers that use a diverse set of tools like me.

[freedomcrusader]

Well, his bash prompt says “root@localhost” so you decide.

Probably not full windows privileges, but root? Why not user he’s logged in as??

[lurked_for_a_decade]

I’m dating myself, but does anyone here remember the MKS toolkit with the Korn shell for DOS and Windows platforms? It also had a full set of UNIX command line utilities.

BASH - ie the Born Again Shell is a mash of the sh, csh, tcsh, and Korn shells with command line editing in either emacs or vi mode. Good stuff. “set -o vi”. I’m waiting for someone to bring back the AT&T windowing Korn shell. Now that was sweet.

Maybe we could call it WaBash.

[GunningForTheBuddha]

It's not really all that different from bash, but paired with some good themes and plugins from Oh My Zsh! it makes the command line feel better to me. Little things like better tab completion, triple-dot popping up two directories at a time, cool git shortcuts, etc. Everything I knew in bash still works, so it feels like another iteration: Bourne, Bourne Again, Z.

[Scutter]

Probably an early internal build of the software. I’d wait and see what it looks like at release.

[Scutter]

Yes, I remember that. I also remember Xenix and the first portable computer from Osborne.

[Scutter]

Should also add - it’s very common at Microsoft when doing demos to use a virtual machine with generic credentials. At Microsoft, your userid is also your email address, and it’s not always a good thing to put your email address in a public video :)