Remove Windows executables from your WSL Linux path

Windows and WSL interoperability is fantastic but sometimes you end up with unintended side effects.  When coding I like to have specific tools and configurations for each environment.  Otherwise, I can get pathing or other problems.   Why is it complaining about a '\r' character when I'm running Linux?  It is because some Linux tools and Windows files collide with each other.

With that in mind, you may wish to remove the Windows executables from your Linux $PATH.  There are two ways to configure the WSL to not import the Windows $PATH.

  1. You can disable or enable it on a per WSL instance basis. 
  2. You can globally configure WSL so that the PATHbehavior is the same for all WSL instances you have configured.

Configuring individual WSL instances with wsl.conf

Each individual WSL instance looks in its own configuration file  /etc/wsl.conf that may not be created by default in your WSL instance.

1. Edit the existing /etc/wsl.conf .  Create a new wsl.conf file in /etc if one doesn't already exist. 
1. Add the following section to /etc/wsl.conf


[interop]
appendWindowsPath = false


wsl.conf's interop section can contain other settings other settings.  They are outside of the scope of this discussion. You can read up on them at documented in https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl-config#example-wslconf-file


# Set whether WSL supports interop processes like launching Windows apps and adding path variables. Setting these to false will block the launch Windows processes and block adding $PATH environment variables

[interop]
enabled = false
appendWindowsPath = false


Configuring all WSL instances identically using .wslconfig

You can configure interop and other properties globally, across all WSL instances on this physical machine. 

Global WSL configuration can be shared across all WSL instances on a machine .wslconfig stored in your Microsoft Windows home directory.  See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl-config#configuration-setting-for-wslconfig The WSL user's home directory is defined in %UserProfile% .  It is typically something like /Users/<username>.

Ex: Joe is a Windows and WSL user whose Windows home directory is in c:/Users/Joe. The full path to .wslconfig would be C:/Users/Joe/.wslconfig.

References

  1. https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4234
  2. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl-config
  3. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl-config#global-configuration-options-with-wslconfig
  4. https://docs.flutter.dev/get-started/install/linux

Revision History

2023/10 Created

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Installing the RNDIS driver on Windows 11 to use USB Raspberry Pi as network attached

Image
I do a lot of my development and configuration via ssh into my Raspberry Pi Zero over the RNDIS connection. Some models of the Raspberry PIs can be configured with  gadget drivers  that let the Raspberry pi emulate different devices when plugged into computers via USB. My favorite gadget  is the network profile that makes a Raspberry Pi look like an RNDIS-attached network device.  All types of network services travel over an RNDIS device without knowing it is a USB hardware connection. A Raspberry Pi shows up as a Remote NDIS (RNDIS) device when you plug the Pi into a PC or Mac via a USB cable. The gadget  in the Windows Device Manager picture shows this RNDIS Gadget connectivity between a Windows machine and a Raspberry Pi. The Problem Windows 11 and Windows 10 no longer auto-installs the RNDIS driver that makes magic happen. Windows recognizes that the Raspberry Pi is some type of generic USB COM device. Manually running W indows Update  or  Upd...
Read more

Understanding your WSL2 RAM and swap - Changing the default 50%-25%

Image
The Windows Subsystem for Linux operates as a virtual machine that can dynamically grow the amount of RAM to a maximum set at startup time.  Microsoft sets a default maximum RAM available to 50% of the physical memory and a swap-space that is 1/4 of the maximum WSL RAM.  You can scale those numbers up or down to allocate more or less RAM to the Linux instance. The first drawing shows the default WSL memory and swap space sizing. The images below show a developer machine that is running a dev environment in WSL2 and Docker Desktop.  Docker Desktop has two of its own WSL modules that need to be accounted for.  You can see that the memory would actually be oversubscribed, 3 x 50% if every VM used its maximum memory.  The actual amount of memory used is significantly smaller allowing every piece to fit. Click to Enlarge The second drawing shows the memory allocation on my 64GB laptop. WSL Linux defaul...
Read more

Almost PaaS Document Parsing with Tika and AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Image
The Apache Tika project provides a  library capable of parsing and extracting data and meta data from over 1000 file types.  Tika is available as a single jar file that can be included inside applications or as a deployable jar file that runs Tika as a standalone service. This blog describes deploying the Tika jar as an auto-scale service in Amazon AWS Elastic Beanstalk.  I selected Elastic Beanstalk because it supports jar based deployments without any real Infrastructure configuration. Elastic Beanstalk auto-scale should take care of scaling up and down for for the number of requests you get. Tika parses documents and extracts their text completely in memory. Tika was deployed for this blog using EC2 t2.micro instances available in the AWS free tier. t2.micro VMs are 1GB which means that you are restricted in document complexity and size. You would size your instances appropriately for your largest documents.   Preconditions An AWS account. AWS ac...
Read more