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"

ref:

• https://gist.github.com/doitian/078e6872a017754c28dd5ce0aa10375b
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/73418572/source-bashrc-in-wsl-in-a-non-interactive-non-login-shell