WSL wslpath

 

In Cygwin I can drag and drop a windows file or folder and have its path updated to linuxy version.  In WSL they do not have this feature yet.

So…

In WSL you do have a path to local drives.  It is at /mnt

 

I can do something like this

> ls /mnt/d/pictures/

And that works.

But if I drag and drop the D:\pictures folder into Ubuntu WSL I get…

D:\pictures

 

Which is not a converted linuxy path like Cygwin does. 
So its not going to work as is.

However there is a tool
wslpath
we can use to convert it. Its not as convenient but it works

Let’s say we want to change directory
Type in this first part of the command

> cd $(wslpath "

 

Then drag and drop in the folder and add in a ") to close it

That works…

but it’s a bit of a pain.
I would rather have some kind of automation.

here is the best I came up with, replacing the cd command.
This still requires you to put the win path in quotes because linux will ignore the single \ in the path

Update .bashrc

> vi ~/.bashrc

And add this to the bottom

cd() {     if [ $# -eq 1 ] && [[ "$1" =~ ^[a-zA-Z]:\\ || "$1" =~ ^[a-zA-Z]:/ || "$1" =~ ^\\\\ ]]; then         # Looks like Windows path (with \ or / or UNC \\server\share)         local winpath="$1"           # Strip outer quotes if present         winpath="${winpath%\'}"         winpath="${winpath#\'}"         winpath="${winpath%\"}"         winpath="${winpath#\"}"         local linuxpath         linuxpath=$(wslpath -u -- "$winpath" 2>/dev/null)          if [ $? -eq 0 ] && [ -d "$linuxpath" ]; then            builtin cd -- "$linuxpath"         else             echo "cd: cannot access '$1' (wslpath failed or not a directory)"             return 1         fi     else         # Normal cd behavior         builtin cd "$@"     fi }

 

Now I can either restart my terminal or run

> source ~/.bashrc

To pick up the changes

Now let me try it

> cd "D:\pictures"

 

That works!

References