Launch WSL from PowerShell

Just wanted to do a quick post of something that I learned today. You don’t have to launch Bash for Windows by clicking the icon or by pressing the start button and typing. You can just as easily run it from the command line.

Open a PowerShell:

Windows PowerShell
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Loading personal and system profiles took 652ms.
C:\Users\phillipsj>

Type wsl and you should now be running Bash:

C:\Users\phillipsj>wsl
phillipsj@DESKTOP:/mnt/c/Users/phillipsj$

phillipsj@DESKTOP:/mnt/c/Users/phillipsj$ bash --version
GNU bash, version 4.4.19(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>

This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

That’s it, I am still working on my other posts and they should be coming out shortly.

If you enjoy the content then consider buying me a coffee.