What does bash on windows mean? How does it work?

It was recently microsoft unveiled their plan to implement GNU/Linux shell functionality on windows operating system. Weeks after this announcement in microsoft developer conference, windows insider preview was released with this feature.

Bash on windows, or more specifically windows subsystem for linux is different from cygwin because, cygwin make use of linux utilities modified and compiled for windows. On the other hand, windows subsystem for linux works with same binaries used by linux. It is made possible by creating a platform which will map linux system calls to windows system calls on real time.

Mr Swapnil Bhartiya, an open source blogger has written an article which explains meaning of `bash for windows`, how does it work and who actually benefits from this, windows or ubuntu.


As the enterprise landscape is changing -- in favor of Linux and open source -- companies like Microsoft are embracing Linux. Most recently, Microsoft announced support for the Unix Bash shell on Windows, providing developers and administrators with an important tool for managing Unix and Linux servers.

Linux is a dominant player in the enterprise space. Microsoft says that more than 25 percent of machines on Azure Cloud run Linux. This means there’s a huge developer base along with a huge administrator base that manages these machines. And, these people need tools to manage their infrastructure.

Microsoft is aware of this increasing demand, and they have tried to bring some basic capabilities like SSH to their PowerShell, but it’s not enough. Developers can also use Cygwin, MSYS, or run Linux in a virtual machine, but all these “workarounds” have their own disadvantages and some serious overload.
Continue reading complete article published in linux.com.

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