Git Bash For Windows

A bit of history, back in 2015 project Astoria was started to bring Android apps to Windows and they built a Linux subsystem called Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) for the purpose. Eventually project Astoria was dropped as it undermined their UWP (Universal Windows Platform) strategy, but some parts were retained and form the basis of bash for Windows. Over the course, Microsoft collaborated with Canonical (creators of Ubuntu Linux) to provide them with a native image with all supported tools/binaries.

For the curious WSL solves the problem of running Linux software using different methods than most other options. WSL 1, intercepts kernel calls and translates them to windows kernel calls (think the opposite of Wine). WSL 2 runs a real Linux kernel in a lightweight VM that has access to the Windows filesystem.

Download File 🔥 https://urlin.us/2y4AOA 🔥

Babun is Cygwin with a full-featured package manager (pact), oh-my-zsh for its shell, git, automatic updates and a plug-in oriented architecture. Although the default shell is zsh you can easily switch to bash. It seems like a nice upgrade from vanilla Cygwin if you don't mind the extra weight.

MinGW is primarily a software distribution and a building platform for Windows. In particular it's a Windows port of the GNU compiler tools, such as GCC, make, bash, and so on. It includes a fair amount of GNU tools and a minimal Unix compatibility layer.

Git for Windows is either just MSYS2 with git installed or at least heavily based on MSYS2. It provides the same shell (bash), terminal (Mintty) and package manager (pacman). It appears to be the most popular way to get the dominant Git running on Windows and along with it you get a nice Unix environment.

Except from WSL most of the above tools share a lot of common technology (libraries, executables, concepts). For example the bash shell that comes with MinGW depends on msys-2.dll which itself is a fork of cygwin.dll. So yes there's plenty of room for confusion :-)

Cmder provides just a nice terminal and a bash-like shell for Windows. It's main component is Conemu (the terminal). On top of that it adds Clink which provides Powerful Bash-style command line editing, a custom prompt layout and the Monokai color scheme. It is highly (or maybe fully) compatible with native windows console programs.

Scoop provides a command line package manager for many well known cross-platform programs including many GNU tools. It downloads pre-compiled packages. It does not provide neither a shell nor terminal but instead runs under windows' cmd.exe (with all its limitations but also with its full compatibility with native windows console programs). It also includes no compiler suite (but of course compilers and development tools are typical packages you can install with scoop). A lot of the programs that Scoop installs either come directly from the MinGW/MSYS project, or were built using their tools.

Gow (Gnu On Windows) is the lightweight alternative to Cygwin without a shell. It uses a convenient Windows installer that installs about 130 extremely useful open source Linux applications compiled as native win32 binaries and available through windows' cmd.exe. It is designed to be as small as possible (about 10 MB).

Mintty is the terminal used in Cygwin, MSYS2 and their derivatives. One should be aware that if you're running windows native console programs it is not a painless replacement for the Windows Command Prompt. While programs with simple text output usually work fine, interactive and full screen ones often have problems. Read more on Mintty's home page and also read the entry "Some native console programs don't work when run from Git Bash" on Git for Windows FAQ. That entry has this recommendations to make when you face this kind of problems:

The issue of Linux commands shadowing windows ones is a common cause of hard to debug trouble in solutions like Cygwin/MSYS2/MinGW. Here's an example: I had a .bat file that was using the timeout command. When run under Cygwin it would fail because timeout is also a Linux command but with different syntax. After I've spotted the issue I found out I could add a PATH=... at the top of the .bat file to make sure the windows command had priority. But then I got an even more cryptic "Input redirection is not supported" error and settled for a workaround before finding the reason.

Remember: software you install in the Bash shell is restricted to the Bash shell. You can access these programs from the Command Prompt, PowerShell, or elsewhere in Windows, but only if you run the bash -c command.

I have now tried this with Sublime Text 4. Julia is run in Terminus, and ST is started in the git bash.

With 1.5.1 and 1.5.2, shell commands are fine; with 1.5.3 shell commands mess up the Julia prompt.

1.6 is again fine.

I can modify the shortcut for Git Bash in the Start menu by using "Run as administrator..." This works, but only for Bash windows opened from the Start menu. It doesn't work for the "Git Bash Here" shell extension and there's no "Run as administrator..." option on right-click context menu.

This morning I saw a colleague working in Git-Bash and the good-old-fashioned "windows command line" and I thought to myself, why doesn't he "just" use Windows terminal? So, I showed him Windows Terminal and he was impressed. First thing he asked then, was if it would be possible to add Git-Bash as a tab. Wel yes, I thought... and I immediately showed him how this can be done via the settings of Windows terminal. At that moment, I didn't realize that this would result in a blogpost ?. I discovered pretty quick that there was a catch and in this post, I want to show you what I did, why it didn't work and finally, how you need to approach this.

All you need, or so I thought, is to add the exe of Gi-Bash to a new windows terminal profile. The idea is that I first found a suboptimal solution (out of a naive approach), which I'll explain first. After that I'll show the correct approach!

After that, we just have to validate our new profile by opening a new tab by clicking on the "downward pointing arrow" and and then on the newly created "Git-Bash" profile: As you can see, the behavior is not at all what we expect as Git-Bash opens in a new window instead of a new tab! This is strange, but not a huge problem. After looking around for a bit, I discovered that there is also another set of exe's sitting in the folders next to the one containing git-bash.exe. It didn't take me very long to figure out that the correct exe that needs to be referenced is this one: C:\Program Files\Git\bin\bash.exe (This one is in a subdirectory of the initial one and does, to my knowledge, the same)

On my server (the Windows machine I'm SSHing into) I will set a registry key to set the default shell. In this case, I'll use open source cross platform PowerShell Core. You can use whatever makes you happy and WSL2's bash makes me happy.New-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\OpenSSH" -Name DefaultShell -Value "C:\WINDOWS\System32\bash.exe" -PropertyType String -ForceNote that bash.exe in this context starts up "wsl -d YOURDEFAULTDISTRO" so you'll want to know what your Default is, and if you don't like it, change it with wsl --set-default DISTRO.

HEADS UP: You need the FULL AND CORRECT PATH in that command above. It works for any shell. Since I'm using bash.exe, I get WSL2 starting up for free but SSH with this solution is using Windows's SSH keys and Windows auth. Note that when you're entering your password for authentication!

I am using some linux only R packages. I built and can successfully run them in wsl2 bash (I have ubuntu 20.04 installed, if that makes any difference). I would like to use the Rstudio IDE on windows to send those directly to R in WSL2.

First, we need to make sure zsh is executed by default for Bash on Ubuntu. This is not mandatory, but if not done you need to type zsh every time. For this, edit the .bashrc file with nano: nano ~/.bashrc and paste this right after the first comments:

When trying to look up for ways to resolve my issue I stumbled upon the following discussion _634953 where its mentioned that 1Password doesn't work within Git Bash, but then other discussions such as the one here: -bash-always-wants-windows-hello-authentication seem to show that it is possible to make 1Password's SSH work with Git Bash.

The SSH agent should work with Git Bash. Could you run an ssh command again in git bash and check the logs of the 1Password app for any errors/messages? You can find the logs here %LOCALAPPDATA%/1Password/logs

Git Bash is an application for Microsoft Windows environments which provides an emulation layer for a Git command line experience. Bash is an acronym for Bourne Again Shell. A shell is a terminal application used to interface with an operating system through written commands. Bash is a popular default shell on Linux and macOS. Git Bash is a package that installs Bash, some common bash utilities, and Git on a Windows operating system.

Yesterday, I spent quite a bit of time getting Karma to run from bash on my Windows 7 (x64) laptop. Since, a month from now, I'll have absolutely no recollection of how I achieved this, I'm writing it down here for the benefit of my future self, as well as any other people who may find this valuable.

My first problem was that 'karma' wasn't a recognized command. Although I'd used Chocolatey to install node.js, used npm to install Karma, and 'karma' was a recognized command from PowerShell, bash didn't recognize it. While I don't yet know if the following is the 100 % correct solution, I managed to make bash recognize karma by adding my karma directory to my bash path:

This works in the session itself, but will be forgotten by bash unless you add it to ~/.bash_profile. BTW, that file doesn't exist by default in a new Git Bash installation on Windows, so you'll have to add it yourself.

? I hope you find this tutorial helpful for installing bash on Windows and experimenting with Linux GUI apps on Windows. No wonder WSL lets you play with Linux inside of Windows. If you have questions or suggestions, feel free to ask. e24fc04721