microsoft / microsoft/WindowsDeveloperConfig

Question about shims

Open
#97 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
PowerShell
Stars
2.2k
Forks
168
Avg merge
5h 14m
Merged PRs (30d)
5

Description

I have a few questions about the shims used by WSL Comfort (pbcopy, pbpaste, open, etc.):

  1. Are these shims intended to provide any kind of isolation or restricted access to Windows executables, or are they only convenience wrappers?

  2. If they are only convenience wrappers, what is the recommended way to create custom shims for additional Windows functionality? Is there an intended pattern or extension point for adding custom shims to WSL Comfort?

  3. Do these shims work when the following WSL interop settings are used?

[interop]
enabled=false
appendWindowsPath=false

In particular, I'm interested in whether a shim could provide access to a specific Windows executable while preventing general access to Windows executables and the Windows PATH.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating the WSL Comfort shim definitions and any related documentation in the repository. Check how the shims invoke Windows executables, whether custom shims have an extension point, and how the [interop] settings affect them. Done means documenting the isolation model, customization pattern, and behavior with interop disabled and Windows PATH appending disabled.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
powershell
Domain
operating-systems
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.