Microsoft brings a lot of improvements to Bash on Ubuntu in Windows 10

by Ivan Jenic

Troubleshooting Expert

June 11, 2016

Affiliate Disclosure

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Microsoft introduced a lot of improvements to Windows 10 Preview with the latest build 14361. A feature that probably received the highest number of changes is Bash on Ubuntu on Windows 10. Microsoft revealed a huge list of improvements for the Ubuntu Bash console of the Subsystem for Linux feature that will help Linux developers do an even better job now.

Here’s what’s fixed and improved in Bash on Ubuntu in the Latest Windows 10 Preview build 14361:

• “DrvFs is now case sensitive when running in Bash on Ubuntu on Windows.
  • Users may create case.txt and CASE.TXT on their /mnt/c drives
  • Case sensitivity is only supported within Bash on Ubuntu on Windows. When outside of Bash, NTFS will report the files correctly, but unexpected behavior may occur interacting with the files from Windows.
  • The root of each volume (i.e. /mnt/c) is not case sensitive
  • More information on handling these files in Windows can be found here.
• Greatly enhanced pty / tty support. Applications like TMUX are now supported
• Fixed install issue where user accounts not always created
• Optimized command line arg structure allowing for extremely long argument list.
• Now able to delete and chmod read_only files from DrvFs
• Fixed some instances where the terminal hangs on disconnect
• chmod and chown now work on tty devices
• Allow connection to 0.0.0.0 and :: as localhost
• Sendmsg/recvmsg now handle an IO vector length of >1
• Users can now opt-out of auto-generated hosts file
• Automatically match Linux locale to the NT locale during install
• Added the /proc/sys/vm/swappiness file
• strace now exits correctly
• Allow pipes to be reopened through /proc/self/fd
• Hide directories under %LOCALAPPDATA%\lxss from DrvFs
• Better handling of bash.exe ~. Commands like “bash ~ -c ls” now supported/li>
• Sockets now notify epoll read available during shutdown
• lxrun /uninstall does a better job of deleting the files and folders
• Corrected ps -f
• Improved support for x11 apps such as xEmacs
• Updated initial thread stack size to match default Ubuntu setting and reporting the size correctly to the get_rlimit syscall
• Improved reporting of pico process image names (e.g. for auditing)
• Implemented /proc/mountinfo for df command
• Fixed symlink error code for child name . and ..
• Additional bug fixes and improvements”

Additionally, Bash also received support for the following syscalls low-levelw level APIs:

• GETTIMER
• MKNODAT
• RENAMEAT
• SENDFILE
• SENDFILE64
• SYNC_FILE_RANGE

Bash on Ubuntu is currently available to Windows Insiders running Windows 10 Preview only. However, Microsoft will release it to the public with the Anniversary Update, making it available to even more Linux developers who want to work on their scripts in Windows 10 without running a virtual machine.

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