Tip: Make your life easier with Symbolic Links in WSL

Modern Windows machines can give you access to Linux command line tools via the Windows Subsystem for Linux. On launch the present working directory is set to the subsystem’s home rather than a location in the main Window’s file structure.

$ pwd
/home/<user>

The main file structure is in /mnt/ so if you’re for example, trying to pattern match and zip a few files getting there is a bit of a pain. The quick solution is to create symbolic links (shortcuts) between the two.

The syntax for symbolic links is ls -s source target.

$ ln -s /mnt/c/Users/<UserName>/Desktop Desktop
$ ln -s /mnt/c/Users/<UserName>/Documents Documents
$ ln -s /mnt/c/Users/<UserName>/Downloads Downloads
$ ls
Desktop Documents  Downloads 

After creating these links we cd into them and end up in the main system and keep just a little more momentum than we otherwise would