Is it possible to open Windows applications from inside a Windows subsystem for Linux terminal?

Question

So, recently I downloaded an Ubuntu installation of Linux for Windows since I wanted to learn how to use a bash shell. I've been enjoying it so far, but was wondering if there was a way to do the above? Say I have iTunes installed on my computer, and I want to open it from my Linux terminal. Is that possible? I've tried going to the desktop folder in the terminal and opening the .lnk files, but it just throws an "cannot execute binary file: Exec format error" at me. Anybody know if it's possible?

Answer 1

Yes, WSL supports launching Windows application executables (such as iTunes) from within the shell. However, as was mentioned in the comments, lnk files are not supported, since they aren't executables. They are links to executables.

WSL also is nice enough to (by default) append your Windows path to your Linux path. So for applications that are in the path (e.g. notepad.exe), you can just launch them directly with the appname.exe format.

For apps that aren't in the path (e.g. itunes.exe), you'll need to determine the location of the actual .exe (executable), and launch it with the full path. This is really the same as for any Linux executable under Linux, or any Windows executable under Windows PowerShell or CMD.

To find the full path to iTunes, just right click on the lnk file in Explorer and choose "Properties". The "Target" field will have something like C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.exe.

As mentioned previously, if you were trying to launch this in Windows PowerShell or the CMD interpreter (the Windows "equivalents" of bash under Linux), you would still need the full path, so you would run:

C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.exe

To launch that particular path in bash in WSL, you would use:

/mnt/c/Program\ Files/iTunes/iTunes.exe

If you need help converting the Windows path to the Linux path, there's a command for that:

wslpath 'C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.exe'

For detailed information on Windows/WSL interoperability, see this doc.

Answer 2

WSL can launch Windows binaries natively via some interop and the use of binfmt_misc

LNK OTOH isn't an executable file but a kind of file that stores metadata for Windows Shell to link to any kind of files, not only executables. Since it's a normal file you need to open it with some applications. In cmd the way to open any files with the default associated program is to use start. So in older WSL you can do like this

cmd.exe /c start ~/Desktop/iTunes.lnk

Obviously %Windir%\System32 must be in your path (which is done by default) or you'll have to fix your WSL environment. The equivalent in PowerShell is Start-Process or Invoke-Item

powershell.exe -Command Start-Process ~/Desktop/iTunes.lnk
powershell.exe -Command Invoke-Item ~/Desktop/iTunes.lnk

For most kinds of files you can also use explorer.exe directly

explorer.exe ~/Desktop/iTunes.lnk

However in WSL2 you have a new command to do that

wslview ~/Desktop/iTunes.lnk

Some other solutions begin wsl-open and eopen

See

• How can I "open" a file from WSL with the default application?

---

_{As an example, either of the below commands will open the current directory in Explorer}

explorer.exe .
wslview .
powershell.exe -Command Start-Process .
powershell.exe -C Invoke-Item .
cmd /c start .

_{or to open some pdf files}

explorer.exe my.pdf
wslview my.pdf
powershell.exe -Command Start-Process my.pdf
powershell.exe -C Invoke-Item my.pdf
cmd /c start my.pdf