How to install Bash in Windows 10 Anniversary Update

Introduction 

Anniversary Update for Windows 10 has been finally released.

You can wait for it to come with Windows Updates, or (like I did) grab it from here as a standalone executable and install it manually. 

Like I anticipated in my previous post Windows 10 to include Bash. Should you care? I don't, Windows 10 will include a Linux subsystem that allows to run Bash commands directly in Windows.

I already voiced my personal opinion on how irrelevant this is to myself personally, as well as to most UNIX/Linux users. However, it's a very exciting feature to test and it can result to be useful in some specific occasions.

Prep steps & installation

After installing the Anniversary Update, you'll need to enable Windows Linux Subsystem.

 

Here's how:

1. From Settings/Update & Security/For Developers, enable Developer Mode.
2. Go to Turn Windows Features On or Off. Enable Windows Subsystem for Linux.  
3. Click OK. You'll need to reboot when it's completed.
4. Enter bash in the command prompt to launch its installation. The Linux subsystem will be downloaded from Windows Store and installed.
5. Create a username and a password for the Linux subsystem.
6. Enjoy! Now you can run UNIX/Linux commands in the Command Prompt. In the below example, I ran one of my favorite commands (ls -l).

Wrap-up

Bash has been included in Windows 10 Anniversary Update and it's maybe Windows 10 most important new feature.

If you use Windows as your main operating system and you work with UNIX/Linux command line as well, you will surely appreciate it.

Not having to boot Linux from USB or from a physical partition for you to have a UNIX/Linux shell will surely allow for a higher productivity.

As already stated in my previous post, I don't consider this update as decisive for UNIX/Linux users. It's a subsystem, not a physical system, and runs on NT kernel, anyway.

Commands run pretty smoothly, for all I could see, but I didn't test advanced functionalities, due to time constraints.

I reserve to update these conclusions in the future.