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Comment by dcw303 | Hacker News Reader

The inotify implementation looks very promising! Editing source files in a Windows-native IDE and having changes picked up by, say, node.js is a great workflow.

I'm yet to try it out, but I wonder if the problems with editing files in the linux filesystem[0] is going to be an issue with this?

[0]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/11/17/do-n...

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It's all fine if the files you're sharing are in the Windows filesystem. If they're in the Linux filesystem the same restrictions still apply.

It works, and really well at that! I've used it with everything from Webpack to Jekyll, and have had no problem over the last few months!

I tried it and it works just fine. Changes from WSL(vim) and windows IDE were picked up correctly by nodemon.

Microsoft: I suspect this blog post is out of date and that, post creators update, this is now safe. If so, maybe you want to edit it?

Wait so you CAN edit linux filesystem files with windows tools now?

That was the main tripping point for me last time I tried out the WSL workflow. Mainly just because a bunch of files in our repo were apparently named in an ntfs unfriendly manner, so when I tried to merge etc. the repo would get corrupted.

The impression I get is that whether or not it works depends on the particular Windows tool. The guidance and the blog post not to do it seems to be the best general advice. My understanding is that the unspoken assumption between the lines is that you may be able to find Windows tools that are well-behaved and will not corrupt things, but don't expect to find that many because alternate streams and complicated metadata are not things most Windows tool developers have had need to understand/deal with/round-trip to date.

NO!

Don't assume that just because the post hasn't been updated in a couple of months that it's somehow been magically "fixed" - it hasn't. In fact, its actually a really tricky problem to solve, and it'll take some time, a great deal of care, and some very well thought-out engineering before we arrive at a fix!

If/when we do fix the underlying issues we'll update this post and publish a new post announcing that the coast is clear ... until then, DO NOT CREATE/MODIFY THE LINUX FILESYSTEM USING WINDOWS TOOLS.

Thanks.

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