The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) has it's own directory in the Windows filesystem that corresponds to /. It's uses some NTFS magic to store the Linux file attributes that don't directly correspond to NTFS file attributes.
It also, within the Linux environment, mounts your host drives under /mnt.
For what I generally use the OSX terminal for, WSL probably hits about 80-90% of my use cases. A lot of lower level utilities have weird issues - e.g., 'ip addr' seems to present the Windows network interfaces as though they were typical Linux ones, 'ss -a' gives a bunch of netlink errors, dmesg says "dmesg: read kernel buffer failed: Function not implemented", 'tcpdump' doesn't work, etc. On the other hand, curl, scp, ssh, etc do exactly what you'd expect.
I hope that these get filled out, at least with more constructive error returns, at some later date.
For now, I'm happy that they have enough of the low hanging fruit ripened sufficiently to make it possible to do 'normal' things from within WSL. I'd honestly rather they make the local (and network) filesystem more performant and robust; maybe they have.
My use case for WSL is coming around in the calendar year again so I'll be revisiting it soon.
I am not so sure about this. I think Dustin Kirkland sheds some more light here:
http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/03/ubuntu-on-windows.htm...
And he seems to be relatively excited about it so he benched it more recently:
https://www.linux.com/learn/howdy-ubuntu-windows-how-fast-it
It seems more like an inverse Wine than a parallel environment.
You can call executables in both directions, even use windows executables in a bash script and pipe its output to awk.
https://docs.microsoft.com/nl-be/windows/wsl/interop#invokin...
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/release-notes
Full disclosure, I work at Microsoft on WSL.
You can do some things to and with MacOS from CLI. Honestly though, it's all stuff I wouldn't miss awfully.
It's not clear to me that Windows has this ...
I, like you, adopted the MacOS ecosystem because it was UNIX underneath ... but there's a big difference between underneath and alongside.
Although it is not commonly done, you can control and interact with your OSX system with UNIX commands ... there's one single filesystem namespace and you can interact with it from the command prompt as well as kill GUI apps or set preferences or ifconfig, etc.
It's my understanding that the Ubuntu subsystem in recent windows is sort of a parallel environment ... but is not meant to control the system directly or as an alternate path of interaction with Windows, correct ?