We’ve raved about Microsoft’s latest take on a Linux subsystem for Windows, this time in the form of the oddly-dubbed “Bash on Ubuntu on Windows” Windows Subsystem for Linux — herein and forever after referred to only as WSL for the sake of our collective sanity — but as awesome as being able to type bash in a command prompt to get access to holy posix goodiness, we think we can do better. Meet $.
$, formally known as RunInBash, is a simple command line helper utility that simply runs whatever follows it under WSL rather than in the current (Windows) terminal. Here’s a picture to illustrate (click to expand):
RunInBash is the equivalent of supplying a correctly- and manually-escaped bash.exe -c "command here" parameter, only it takes care of all the escaping and interpolation for you.
$ printf "It's just like \"%s\"" magic
RunInBash is, of course, released 100% free under the terms of the MIT license, and is published on GitHub. Pull requests are welcomed and feel free to fork away!