Support WSL configuration where Windows paths are not in PATH

[Pytal]

Fixes #173 with the caveat of the wait option being ignored as mentioned here.

Fixes #186

[sindresorhus]

Did you see #188 (comment) ?

// @tim-stasse

[Pytal]

Yes, I referenced it at the top. I noted the caveat in index.d.ts.

[sindresorhus]

No, I meant that the existing implementation does the same as wslview does under the hood without the caveat, so what's the benefit of this PR?

[Pytal]

Right sorry for the misunderstanding.

The use case for this is for users on WSL who do not have Windows paths exposed to WSL as seen in this create-react-app issue and therefore do not necessarily have powershell in PATH.

[sindresorhus]

The use case for this is for users on WSL who do not have Windows paths exposed to WSL as seen in this create-react-app issue and therefore do not necessarily have powershell in PATH.

And there's no way to fix this without using wslview? I would explore that option first.

[Pytal]

I only know of wslview as a utility baked into WSL (on a few distros, most notably Ubuntu) for opening URLs and files in Windows. Do you have any suggestions for an alternative solution where neither wslview nor powershell is used?

Maybe a hardcoded path to powershell could be used when it can't be found in PATH, although this feels hacky and is probably unexpected bahviour for the end-user who has opted not to expose Windows paths.

[tim-stasse]

@Pytal I believe the actual issue that needs to be resolved here is #186

As I mentioned in #188, wslview uses powershell.exe under the hood. It works regardless of whether powershell.exe is on the path—or not—by programmatically constructing the path to the windows installation folder, and then appending a hard coded path to the powershell binary from there—you can see what I mean by taking a look at lines 111, 125, and 154 from wslview's source code.

[Pytal]

@tim-stasse Would the solution mentioned here suffice? Or is it preferable to not use another binary?

[tim-stasse]

@Pytal wslvar comes from the same set of wslu binaries as wslview, so yes it should work.

Probably just something like the following should work:

command = '$(wslvar systemroot)\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe'
cliArguments.push(
	'-NoProfile',
	'-NonInteractive',
	'–ExecutionPolicy',
	'Bypass',
	'-EncodedCommand'
);

if (isWsl) {
	command = await wslToWindowsPath(command);
} else {
	childProcessOptions.windowsVerbatimArguments = true;
}

[Pytal]

@tim-stasse I've made the changes using wslvar and I'd appreciate your feedback

[tim-stasse]

@Pytal Looks good to me 👍