BASH on Windows.. apparently not an April fools..

[kalniel]

Despite the close shave with the dates...

https://blogs.windows.com/buildingap...tu-on-windows/

[peterb]

Interesting, but surely if you are developing for *nix system, you would be using the OS system natively, or at least in a VM? So why would you use a restricted Windows environment?

[kalniel]

Interesting, but surely if you are developing for *nix system, you would be using the OS system natively, or at least in a VM? So why would you use a restricted Windows environment?

Some of us produce in Windows, and use VMs or remote sessions where we need to.. but have still found ourselves wanting to write a quick shell hack for some local file manipulation/text parsing Yes, you can do it in powershell, but BASH is so much quicker given existing experience. There's a bunch of other things it'd be easier for me to do this way as well.

Believe it or not, some even switched to Mac because of the OS X terminals.

[virtuo]

Some of the standard bash tools would be great for me, I work primarily on linux servers and always look like a tool trying to grep, vim or cat my way around in a Windows Command prompt.

I do worry it's not going to be quite as good as they are making out, but I'm keeping an open mind.

[bytejunkie]

Interesting, but surely if you are developing for *nix system, you would be using the OS system natively, or at least in a VM? So why would you use a restricted Windows environment?

i thought like this, until i read this blog post
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Develo...Windows10.aspx

he really captures it. its not about running bash, its about running things inside bash. for instance, i don't want to run the cygwin version of grep, i want to run grep. natively. just the way im used to using it.
run that down the stack (which i'll admit will probably take some time) and i can run mongodb (insert tool of choice) inside bash but from the windows file system.

I'm not totally sure thats the right example, but the fact i;'ll natively have access to the tools im used to using from my corporate box, will make life loads easier. please microsoft, don't screw this one up.

[DanceswithUnix]

Interesting, but surely if you are developing for *nix system, you would be using the OS system natively, or at least in a VM? So why would you use a restricted Windows environment?

Embrace...

This is text only at the moment so you will be missing some useful stuff like DDD. But still, lots of automation tasks can be done with just access to the basic utilities.

I do wonder if it will stay as text only to reinforce the lie that Unix is only about command line interfaces.

[Peter Parker]

I'll have to see if I can find a Windows machine to try this on.

As a developers, there's some things I'd like to test out :-

* Does sudo work? Is it needed?
* Does the ports <1024 restriction apply? I think Windows an Linux differ in this respect

Looks like an interesting way to allow more collaborative dev environments without enforcing that everyone installs Linux or Vagrant.

[DanceswithUnix]

Well some benchmarks have started popping up, and they are actually rather good. Generally trading blows with a genuine Linux install and for such a new technology putting in a damned good showing. Most of the tests look kind of like:



where it is all a wash. The more memory & cpu intensive stuff Windows actually wins:



There was one where Windows failed badly, and not surprisingly it was filesystem heavy task of compilation.



Buy hey, you would be doing that on a genuine Linux box anyway wouldn't you.

(All taken from http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...0-lxcore&num=1)

[directhex]

This is text only at the moment so you will be missing some useful stuff like DDD. But still, lots of automation tasks can be done with just access to the basic utilities.

I do wonder if it will stay as text only to reinforce the lie that Unix is only about command line interfaces.

If you install an Xserver and export DISPLAY=:0, GUI stuff works.