Ask HN: What did Bash for Windows give you?

I run a Cygwin Bash script as a Windows service. (Yes, startable and stoppable with the Services panel, running in the background, and starting automatically on boot.)

It contains a loop which contains an ssh tunnel open with some port forwards.

Just yesterday, I cleaned a Windows partition to free up some space, with the help of "du -a . | sort -n" to find the biggest files/directories, then selective "rm -rf".

Windows doesn't ship with anything to help with this task. There are only third-party add-ons like WinDirStat.

I finally can compile and crosscompile x64 binaries on my old PC. WSL idea it's great because it's the only way you can use x64 linux binaries on a DualCore (CPU without VT-x instructions, which makes VM not an option) and that without leaving Windows.

I just crosscompiled my favorite video player (mpv) just following Linux howto steps. Had to compile and install the mingw-w64 toolchain in order to compile win32 binaries, but everything worked like it should. It's a pretty big project that downloads, patches and compiles more than 40 libraries like FFmpeg. 5Gb of source code that compiles in a single 30Mb mpv.exe file.

I wasn't expecting much from WSL but I'm impressed it worked so well.

Nothing yet. Only available for WinX - and given the recent fiasco with ahemahem "not automatic, nooosir" forced upgrade, we're frozen at Win7 for some time to come, by executive fiat. So, Cygwin for me it is: rsync, scriptable ssh (yeah yeah plink.exe, meh), usable pipes, bash even. It would be highly convenient to have this natively - alas.

n.b - I actually meant Ubuntu bash for Windows, not cygwin and friends