Re: native Linux userland in Windows 10

[John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>]

Warren Young scripsit:

> (Open question: does UfW’s Bash shell accept UNC paths?)

No.  It treats a leading double slash as a single slash, despite the Posix
permission to do otherwise, and treats a non-leading double slash as an
error, despite the Posix requirement not to do that.  (I have reported
this bug to Feedback Hub.)  Thus, even though "cat ./dogs" works,
"cat .//dogs" returns ENOENT.

> I’d say UfW checks off most of the defining characteristics of an
> OS: there’s a separate kernel and userland, it does scheduling,
> mediates IPC, keeps processes from stomping on each other…  About
> the only thing it doesn’t do is privilege separation, but if that’s
> a necessary qualification for a thing to be an OS, a Linux box booted
> into single-user mode isn’t an OS, either.

Actually, it does do privilege separation independent of Windows.
I added cowan as a user with useradd -m, and I just do "su - cowan" by
hand as the first thing when the initial bash starts up.  All is well;
I get EPERM when I try to write into /bin.

> “You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”

/me grins.

> If that is your decision for yourself, that’s perfectly fine.
> However, I predict that a whole lot of people will find uses for this
> technology, thereby making it “useful,” by definition.

+1

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan@ccil.org
If you have ever wondered if you are in hell, it has been said, then
you are on a well-traveled road of spiritual inquiry.  If you are
absolutely sure you are in hell, however, then you must be on the Cross
Bronx Expressway.  --Alan Feuer, New York Times, 2002-09-20

--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple