The Bash shell is coming to Windows 10 in the upcoming Anniversary Update (Redstone).

In a press and analyst briefing a few months back, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella put up a slide proclaiming Microsoft ♥ Linux. Wow! What a great slide and what a change for Microsoft! The trade press picked up on this slide in a major way, with a number of articles echoing this new approach to Linux and open source within Microsoft. And they’re right!

"The Bash shell is coming to Windows. Yes, the real Bash is coming to Windows," said Microsoft's Kevin Gallo at Build 2016 keynote. "This is not a VM [Virtual Machine]. This is not cross-compiled tools. This is native."

Here's the steps to run Bash on Windows 10 OS:

  1. Open the Windows Start menu
  2. Type "bash" [hit enter]
  3. Which opens a cmd.exe console running Ubuntu's /bin/bash with full access to all of Ubuntu user space

Yes, you are right, that means apt, set, ssh, rsync, find, ls, grep, awk, sed, sort, xargs, md5sum, gpg, curl, wget, apache, mysql, python, perl, ruby, ruby gem, php, gcc, tar, vim, emacs, diff, patch, nano...and most of the tens of thousands binary packages available in the Ubuntu archives!

Also, Rich Turner and Russ Alexander recorded a Build 2016 session introducing and demonstrating Bash running on Ubuntu on Windows.


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