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Having a Bash subsystem isn't really enough to do real work.You need the rest of the subsystems that go along with it, like sed, awk, grep, perl, cut, tail and the like, not to mention ssh. It's the Gnu toolbox that gives the command like real power to manipulate things. I've got some scripts that run through crontab on the systems that I support that do some really amazing things for me. Sure would be nice to have a 'write once, use anywhere' architecture for such things.

It's really too bad that exchange has such a huge lock on the messaging market. Without MS-Exchange and MS-Office, there would be no place for Microsoft.

> Having a Bash subsystem isn't really enough to do real work.You need the rest of the subsystems that go along with it, like sed, awk, grep, perl, cut, tail and the like, not to mention ssh. It's the Gnu toolbox that gives the command like real power to manipulate things

If the Server WSL is like the one for client Windows, you can run a distro (e.g. Ubuntu) in it, including the normal GNU and other distro-supplied programs and languages. Just not the Linux kernel or driver/service-level stuff. You'll still be running the NT kernel. But all the GNU utilities and whatnot will see a Linux-like environment.

I picture it sort of like a chroot'ed environment. I regularly take older mission-critical machines that have to stay with old-version tool-chains (GCC, make, etc.) for compatibility reasons, and place them under a modern Linux chroot host so that they have the modern kernel, but the chroot'ed /bin, /lib, /usr, /etc, etc. are all the old stuff. Works like a champ.

I'm not saying that's exactly what Microsoft is doing here, but it's sort of how I interpret what I've read so far about their intention for "running Linux under Windows". They really mean "running GNU tools and open source applications under Windows". And that specifically includes all the tools like sed, awk, grep, and so forth.

It's gonna play hell with Cygwin's users (which includes my company big-time). If Microsoft does this right, there will be no reason to deal with Cygwin or similar subsystems. But converting will take time. And who knows if Microsoft will do it right enough.

Whether you'll get crontabs and so forth any time soon is a different question entirely.