Feature: /etc/windows-release

[mcandre]

As an aid to scripts attempting to determine the nature of the runtime environment with cat /etc/*release*, could bash on Ubuntu on Windows include a /etc/windows-release or similar file?

[sunilmut]

@mcandre - Thanks for the suggestion. Interesting idea, but can also feels like a dangerous proposition for compatibility. We don't want to encourage any packages taking a dependency on this and introducing WSL specific behavior, that can also hide bugs in WSL.

[therealkenc]

It was brought up last year that it should be in /proc/version. Linux version 4.4.0-10.0.16237-Microsoft. The version on my Android phone is for example 3.10.61-10942903. Too lazy to dig up the issue#....

Sunil, people are going to take WSL dependencies in their software. Because there are WSL dependencies. Take for example this patch to Meteor here, which works around #1529 (an issue that did not even rate a "that's going to be really hard to fix" response from anyone). So people hide work around the bugs.

Anyway, from a bash script in WSL:

ken@HEADCRASH:~$ systeminfo.exe | sed -n 4p | awk '{print $3}'
10.0.16237

[benhillis]

I agree with @therealkenc. Running systeminfo.exe or ver.exe via interop is probably the right way to go.

[Herst]

Another example of a WSL-specific fix: eventlet/eventlet@09e166b

On a side note, maybe they should be collected at some location for future in order to inform those developers when WSL oddities get fixed (e.g. in order to prevent workarounds causing problems once WSL follows the behavior of an original Linux™, we've been there with IE).

[therealkenc]

Even more amusing is glibc-wsl, which works around #1878 by rolling back this commit. That is, if one is willing to put "Cygwin for WSL" on the table, you can fix all kinds of stuff 😏.

[SRGOM]

/proc/sys/kernel/osrelease has Microsoft in it (since you only want the "nature" of the runtime env).

[zszszsz]

or otherwise a uname -r will do it.

[benhillis]

The Windows version is now part of /proc/version.

cat /proc/version
Linux version 4.4.0-17074-Microsoft ([email protected]) (gcc version 5.4.0 (GCC) ) #1002-Microsoft Thu Jan 01  PST 2016