Workaround for microsoft/WSL#1614 (place in /usr/bin/winrun)

winrun.sh

#!/bin/bash

command=$1
args=${@:2}
winrun_pid=$$
pidfile="/tmp/winrun-pid-$(date +%s)"

if [[ $args != '' ]]; then
  argumentlist="-ArgumentList \"$args\""
fi

powershell_command="
\$process = Start-Process -NoNewWindow -PassThru \"$command\" $argumentlist
if (\$process) {
  echo \$process.id
  Wait-Process \$process.id
  exit \$process.ExitCode
} else {
  # startup failure
  echo -1
}"

powershell.exe -Command "$powershell_command" > $pidfile &
linux_pid=$!

# Use tail to wait for the file to be populated
while read -r line; do
  windows_pid=$(echo $line | tr -d '\r\n')
  break # we only need the first line
done < <(tail -f $pidfile)
rm $pidfile

if [[ $windows_pid == -1 ]]; then
  exit 127
fi

term() {
  taskkill.exe -pid $windows_pid > /dev/null
}

trap term SIGTERM
trap term SIGINT

while ps -p $linux_pid > /dev/null; do
  wait $linux_pid
done
exit $?

Installation:

1. Copy script contents to /usr/bin/winrun
2. Make the file executable using sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/winrun

Usage:

winrun <command> [arguments...]

Example:

echo hello > myfile.txt
winrun notepad myfile.txt

This doesn't handle spaces correctly. For example:

echo hi > "multispace  .txt"
winrun notepad "multispace  .txt"

Will result in Notepad complaining about not be able to find multispace .txt (note the whitespace difference).

I was able to get it to work by changing args=${@:2} to args=$(printf '"`"%s`"",' "${@:2}") ; args=${args%,} and argumentlist="-ArgumentList \"$args\"" to argumentlist="-ArgumentList $args".

This is not showing the log in wsl? e.g. i started a java process with this script and i don't see the logs.

This is very cool though I can't seem to have it work on ssh: had to change 'powershell.exe' to the full path from wsl to the powershell and same thing for taskkill.exe, though this last one doesn't seem to kill the process.

Update: I changed both paths correctly (I think the path to taskkill was wrong), /mnt/c/Windows/System32/WindowsPowerShell/v1.0/powershell.exe and /mnt/c/Windows/System32/taskkill.exe, and now I can terminate the task with CTRL+C. Letting a program run in the background and trying to terminate with "kill -9 pid" doesn't work though.

Letting a program run in the background and trying to terminate with "kill -9 pid" doesn't work though.

This is to be expected as SIGKILL is not something that can be intercepted and immediately kills a process without cleanup