symlink windows exe to wsl

wsl snippets permanent-notes

Create symlinks in ~/bin

# Create ~/bin if it doesn't exist
[ ! -d "$HOME/bin" ] && mkdir "$HOME/bin"
 
# link windows exe files
ln -snf "$(which pscp.exe)" "$HOME/bin/scp"
ln -snf "$(which ssh.exe)" "$HOME/bin/ssh"
ln -snf "$(which scp.exe)" "$HOME/bin/scp"
ln -snf "$(which gpg.exe)" "$HOME/bin/gpg"

Then add these lines to ~/.zshenv. This is needed because running wsl command will create a non-login, non-interactive shell and zsh will source this file in that scenario.

# Prepend $HOME/bin to PATH
if [[ ! ":$PATH:" == *":$HOME/bin:"* ]]; then
    export PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
fi

The above solution will works only on zsh, other shells like fish or csh might source different files.
For bash however, there no way to automatically source a file in a non-login non-interactive shell. So one can directly symlink the executable in /usr/bin. However it is not recommended as it modifies global executables.

# Back up the WSL gpg executable
sudo mv /etc/bin/gpg /etc/bin/gpg.old
 
# link the Windows gpg executable
sudo ln -snf "$(which gpg.exe)" "/etc/bin/gpg"

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