It's such a huge pain to set up bash on windows (it worked fine, very easy on one laptop but I cannot get bash or wsl working on another newer laptop) that I wrote a very basic wrapper for shell scripts that will transform arguments of Linux user land (like cp, mv, rm) to their windows equivalent. This way all you need is python and your "bash" scripts can just work. Sorta. There are a lot of edge cases. But at least it works enough that I can stop trying to figure out how to install bash on windows or what's wrong with my laptop.
I installed wsl on like 10 machines, including "newer laptops", and never had problems with the setup. Instead of solving your actual problem you created a whole new problem domain, that seems... not like the way to go
The "domain" I care about is for basic build scripts to work on Windows and Linux. Whichever way gets me back to regular work is the best way! I do not have the experience to debug when BoW or WSL do not work unfortunately.
while it can be a pain to deal with windows quirks, writing a wrapper script to deal with low level file IO stuff sounds like a good way to open a whole can of worms and irrevocably mess up your whole system
What was the problem with WSL? It's been trivial to install on every machine I've tried: work, personal, old, new, upgraded from Windows 7, local account, Microsoft account, etc.
Yes I had that experience until this one laptop, ironically it's a surface laptop. Most likely I screwed some setting up but now no tutorial for bash in windows or wsl works anymore and I have no idea how to work around.
