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This finally makes bash on windows functional. It was one of its limitations that made it feel disconnected from the rest of Windows.
by kyriakos 10y ago
This finally makes bash on windows functional. It was one of its limitations that made it feel disconnected from the rest of Windows.
- TimTheTinker 10y agoIt also introduces potentially significant new attack surface.
- flukus 10y agoDoes it expose any network service by default?
- laumars 10y agoNo more so than any of the shells that's already available on Windows (batch scripts, WSH, Powershell). If one was to exploit scripting on Windows, it would make more sense to target the existing shells rather than Bash as they're more widespread on Windows. Plus Bash on Windows isn't a new thing: we already have Cygwin, MinGW and I believe there was also some native Windows PE ports too. This is just a better implementation than the aforementioned three.
- dspillett 10y agoAny more so than, say, using bash and friends via cygwin or similar?
- criddell 10y agoMaybe. Cygwin is old code and sometimes that's better than new code from a security point of view.
- dragonwriter 10y agoYes, insofar as anything that allows you to do anything with your computer expands the attack surface. Like nearly everything, it's a context-dependent cost-benefit consideration.
- Matthias247 10y agoYes, that's really the missing piece and sounds great. Before that it really felt isolated, like working in a VM. My use-case was to have a full featured bash for invoking some build scripts built still to be able to utilize some windows executables (most imporantly currently docker for windows) in it. Seems like this should do it.
- jsingleton 10y agoThis does sound like it will make it a reasonable choice once it's stable. I currently use Git Bash and it integrates pretty nicely. I typically install it along with git and Git Extensions. It's great when you already know the bash way of doing something, hashing files for example.
- Matthias247 10y agoYes, I also use git bash / msys currently and I'm pretty happy with it. But there were a few cases were it caused problems, e.g. the automatic translation of file names caused some headaches for me (in most cases you want it, but e.g. in docker statements you don't want it). Wanted to try whether WSL can even improve that. The old version was unfortunately too limited, but this update sounds very promising and I will test it again.