I can't see pasted files in bash for windows

Question

I'm working a programming project from school and decided to give Bash for windows a try. I downloaded the skeleton files for the project and pasted them inside the folder where my bash home folder should be. When I open the terminal and go inside the folder it shows as if there was nothing there even though I'm at the right folder. How can I get the files to be displayed?

Answer 1

EDIT: By now, there is actually a supported way to access these files. You have to use the \\wsl$\Legacy "network" share. For example, you could access your WSL home folder in Windows using \\wsl$\Legacy\home\<username>. Still, you should not directly access the lxss directory.

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You are not supposed to touch the LXSS folder ever. The files there are use special attributes which are not understood by normal Windows applications to provide the features of a full Linux file system which NTFS on its own can't provide.

There is one hard-and-fast rule when it comes to Bash on Windows:

DO NOT, under ANY circumstances, create and/or modify Linux files using Windows apps, tools, scripts, consoles, etc. Creating/changing Linux files from Windows will likely result in data corruption and/or damage your Linux environment requiring you to uninstall & reinstall your distro! Note: Your “Linux files” are any of the files and folders under %localappdata%\lxss – which is where the Linux filesystem – distro and your own files – are stored on your drive

If you want to copy a file into a WSL directory which is not under /mnt, then use WSL to copy the file, i.e. use cp /mnt/c/original/folder/of/the/file.txt ~/ for example.

A more advanced alternative is starting a local SSH server in WSL and using Win-SSHFS to mount the WSL root as a drive in Windows. This way, file access will go through WSL.