Is it possible for a script to open a WSL bash shell and send commands to it?

Question

What I want is to have a desktop shortcut that will run a script. I've been trying to use batch and Python, but I don't really care what language if it works. I need the script to open a bash shell (Windows Subsystem for Linux) and execute simple commands while keeping the shell open. At first, I thought this would simple, but now I'm questioning if it's even possible. I made a simple batch file that would get as far as opening bash and keep it open, but the test command I put in didn't make it to the shell. (I didn't really expect it to but I can't think of a good way to do this, so I've just been trying random stuff). Here is the batch file I used:

bash
cowsay test
PAUSE

After this, I tried using a Python script to open bash and run a shell script that would keep the shell open and execute commands. Here is the Python script:

import os
import time

os.system("start /wait bash /c {./test.sh}")
while 1:
    time.sleep(2)

For some reason, this gives an error saying it can't find bash. This isn't really for a project or anything. It's actually for a friend's computer as kind of a joke, but I would really like to know if this is possible. If anyone has any ideas how this could work, I would appreciate it because I'm out of ideas and can't find any other similar questions.

WSL bash.exe is only a 64-bit build that's installed in the real System32. I assume your Python is 32-bit, so "System32" gets redirected to "SysWOW64". A WOW64 app (only a WOW64 app) can refer to the real "System32" directory as "SysNative", e.g. bash_path = os.path.join(os.environ['SystemRoot'], 'SysNative', 'bash.exe'). — Eryk Sun
– Eryk Sun, Commented Nov 22, 2017 at 8:17
You'll need to use subprocess.Popen, with stdin, stdout, and stderr redirected to pipes and two dedicated reader threads, one for stdout and the other for stderr. Do not use shell=True or a batch script; CMD doesn't need to be involved with this in any way. — Eryk Sun
– Eryk Sun, Commented Nov 22, 2017 at 8:21

FELASNIPER · Accepted Answer · 2017-11-21 18:44:41Z

1

Yes, you can do something like this

import subprocess

from subprocess import Popen
p = Popen("batch.bat", cwd=r"C:\Path\to\batchfolder")
stdout, stderr = p.communicate()

answered Nov 21, 2017 at 18:44

FELASNIPER

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