The Windows Subsystem for Linux (aka WSL or Bash on Ubuntu on Windows) provides a fantastic reproduction of a local Linux environment without needing a virtual machine.

Even better than a virtual machine, WSL includes a lot of conveniences for interoperating with the host Windows file system and processes. That is, I can access my C: drive via /mnt/c/ and I can pop calc via calc.exe.

Naturally, the nature of file paths in Linux and Windows are quite different so WSL performs some translations where it can (e.g. for the current working directory) and provides the wslpath utility for explicit conversions where necessary.

Recently I discovered that even though the root filesystem of my particular WSL installation is accessible from Windows (via %LocalAppData%/lxss/rootfs in my case), WSL will not translate just any path within Linux to a path within this rootfs directory. And this is because WSL is designed with the idea that Windows processes should not modify WSL files.

However I work with various version controlled scripts shared amongst developers on Mac, Linux, and Windows (via Cygwin mostly) that use /tmp/ as a staging area (via mktemp) and when using WSL, Windows processes don’t see this directory. If the current working directory is in /tmp/, the working directory of the Windows process will become the Windows user profile directory instead. And running wslpath -w /tmp/ just returns Result not representable.

To avoid modifying the shared scripts to be WSL-aware, I instead converted my WSL tmp directory to be mounted from the Windows host file system via the following set of commands.

First, define the directory to use as WSL’s tmp, I chose C:\wsltemp\ out of convenience, but it could be any path you prefer.

$ mkdir -p /mnt/c/wsltmp
$ chmod 1777 /mnt/c/wsltmp # tmp dir should have the Sticky-bit set
$ sudo chown root: /mnt/c/wsltmp

Also, to ensure Linux’ case-sensitivity is honoured for this directory, from an elevated PowerShell, run:

> fsutil.exe file setCaseSensitiveInfo c:\wsltmp enable

While NTFS has supported opt-in case-sensitivity for a very long time, it has only recently supported setting it per directory.

Finally, define the mount in WSL and mount it:

printf '\n/mnt/c/wsltmp\t/tmp\tnone\tbind\t0\t0\n' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab
sudo mount -a

Now your WSL session, and future sessions (assuming you haven’t disabled mountFsTab), will have a /tmp/ directory which will be correctly translated for Windows processes.

Warning: if you use ssh-agent in WSL, mounting /tmp/ to a DrvFS volume instead of LxFS will mean the ssh-agent socket (in /tmp/ssh-*/agent.*) will not be available for WSL processes to connect, it will only be accessible by Win32 processes and therefore not useful for typical scenarios.