Ask HN: What did Bash for Windows give you?

7 points by reflog 9 years ago | 4 comments

This is not a troll question :) I am honestly interested - what tools did you bring from your Linux toolbelt into your Windows world when Bash for Windows became available? (if any).

Any suggestions, tips and tricks are welcome.

Thanks in advance!

kazinator 9 years ago |

I run a Cygwin Bash script as a Windows service. (Yes, startable and stoppable with the Services panel, running in the background, and starting automatically on boot.)

It contains a loop which contains an ssh tunnel open with some port forwards.

Just yesterday, I cleaned a Windows partition to free up some space, with the help of "du -a . | sort -n" to find the biggest files/directories, then selective "rm -rf".

Windows doesn't ship with anything to help with this task. There are only third-party add-ons like WinDirStat.

onoma 9 years ago |

I finally can compile and crosscompile x64 binaries on my old PC. WSL idea it's great because it's the only way you can use x64 linux binaries on a DualCore (CPU without VT-x instructions, which makes VM not an option) and that without leaving Windows.

I just crosscompiled my favorite video player (mpv) just following Linux howto steps. Had to compile and install the mingw-w64 toolchain in order to compile win32 binaries, but everything worked like it should. It's a pretty big project that downloads, patches and compiles more than 40 libraries like FFmpeg. 5Gb of source code that compiles in a single 30Mb mpv.exe file.

I wasn't expecting much from WSL but I'm impressed it worked so well.

Piskvorrr 9 years ago |

Nothing yet. Only available for WinX - and given the recent fiasco with ahemahem "not automatic, nooosir" forced upgrade, we're frozen at Win7 for some time to come, by executive fiat. So, Cygwin for me it is: rsync, scriptable ssh (yeah yeah plink.exe, meh), usable pipes, bash even. It would be highly convenient to have this natively - alas.

reflog 9 years ago |

n.b - I actually meant Ubuntu bash for Windows, not cygwin and friends