3 ms·

> It's not a network path~ It's a network path listening only on "localhost".

• WorldMaker 7y ago
  At a high level it's much closer to a Win32 Namespace [1] that appears like a network path. UNC stands for Universal Naming Convention, there's no "Network" in the UNC abbreviation as there are many namespaces other than just network paths. Which is why the $ was chosen for the name because it is a valid Namespace character but not a valid system name in Windows, and they wanted to avoid the problem of people with systems named "wsl" suddenly unable to be accessible over the network, because Namespaces have higher priority than network paths. You could think of it as bypassing the network, but it is maybe more accurate to view it that network access is a fallback of UNC paths after all local Namespaces have been checked if they support the path. Also, yes the current implementation backing that namespace/path is a Plan 9-based network file server, but that's an implementation detail that could change, seems to handled under the covers of the Namespace a little more directly than usual network access (including avoiding a localhost "loopback"), and probably something subject to change as WSL's needs change. [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/naming-a-file#namespaces https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/naming...