Is there a way to access a WSL folder from the Windows host or vice versa?

Question

I've Windows 2010 home ed installed and on top i have installed Ubuntu extension support by Windows.

I've started wrting my project there but not sure how to access directory in Ubuntu from my windows system (host)

any thoughts? Thanks in advance

I'd prefer to not use any external tool for it.

Answer 1

In Windows10 after the may 2019 update, the expected way to access WSL files from windows is via the mounted network drive.

You can access it at \\wsl$\<distro> via explorer, etc. You can even just launch explorer from wsl by running explorer.exe from your WSL shell.

See the dev blog post here for more info: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/whats-new-for-wsl-in-windows-10-version-1903/

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To access the Windows10 filesystem you can just use the mounted filesystem at /mnt/<drive_letter> in WSL

Answer 2

figured out lately and as mentioned by @imbuedHope, from wsl command bash shell, you can open current directory by specifying . as follows:

explorer.exe .  //notice the dot

then u could navigate using windows explorer to wherever u want.

Answer 3

In Windows 11 Home, the Linux/Ubuntu folder automatically shows up in Windows Explorer.

In Linux/Ubuntu, the Windows filesystem shows up under /mnt/<mountname>/c. [The "mountname" was a choice provided during the WSL2 installation.] I can access Windows "My Documents" folder through the path: /mnt/arun/c/Users/arun/Documents/.