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start . is used to launch an explorer window from cmd.

When doing the same from wsl, I get

$ start . start: Unable to connect to system bus: Failed to connect to socket /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory

Is there an easy way to fix this?

ripper234
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2 Answers2

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Since Creators Update you can call Windows executables from WSL if you add the extension file. You can open the present folder like this.

explorer.exe .

If you still need start then you can create an alias

alias start='cmd.exe /c start'

then start . will work too.

onoma
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You can call Windows executables from WSL but you should add the extension of the file too. also there is another problem that in wsl when you want to open a directory in the file explorer, you should use explorer.exe \\home\\username\\projects\\ command because windows cannot understand linux standard path slashes. so, I made a wrapper to solve all of these problems. this project is a wrapper between the Linux command-line and windows file-explorer that converts / to \\.

with this wrapper you can interact with the windows file-explorer exactly like the linux-native one. the below box exhibits the way you can open file explorer using this wrapper.

explorer /home/
Mahyar Shokraeian
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    There is a built-in utility for that in WSL for Windows build 1803 called [wslpath](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows10v1803/). There is also a SO post on this [here](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53474575/how-to-translate-the-wslpath-home-user-to-windows-path) – zielot Feb 03 '22 at 23:28