[WSL]: code . better error when 'cmd.exe' is not on the path

[andreialecu]

Issue Type: Bug

Running:

"/c/Users/<username>/AppData/Local/Programs/Microsoft VS Code Insiders/bin/code-insiders" .

This is printed in the console before Code starts, it's a message that I'm not seeing in stable Code:

/c/Users/<username>/AppData/Local/Programs/Microsoft VS Code Insiders/bin/code-insiders: line 29: cmd.exe: command not found

Code Insiders will open, but the project will be opened from the Windows path (X:\dir\dir, instead of /x/dir/dir), without Remote-WSL.

This is likely to break various tooling and workflows relying on the command line.

VS Code version: Code - Insiders 1.34.0-insider (473af338e1bd9ad4d9853933da1cd9d5d9e07dc9, 2019-05-01T00:22:05.899Z)
OS version: Windows_NT x64 10.0.17763

[andreialecu]

Actually, it seems this is because /c/Windows/System32 isn't in my WSL path. After adding it to the PATH env, it works properly.

Perhaps a friendlier error message about what to do would be a good addition. I feel I'm not the only person in the world to do this: microsoft/WSL#1493

[andreialecu]

Thanks for taking note of this.

From what I can see, the cmd.exe call is just used to run the sibling code-insiders.cmd in the same directory as the code-insiders bash script. The .cmd file doesn't look particularly complicated.

Wouldn't it be better to just drop the cmd.exe call altogether and include the code from the .cmd natively in the main bash script?

I feel cmd.exe won't be on the PATH for a lot of people, and it seems like it could be fixed outright, rather than just reported to the user that he needs to take additional action.

[alexr00]

I removed /mnt/c/WINDOWS/system32 from my WSL path then:

$ code .
/mnt/c/Users/alros/.vscode/extensions/ms-vscode-remote.remote-wsl-0.36.0/scripts/wslCode.sh: line 12: wsl.exe: command not found
Visual Studio Code for WSL currently only supports the default distro. Use 'wslconfig.exe' to configure the default distro.

That message doesn't explain that the path is missing something.

[alexr00]

Now I'm getting an exception:

alros@ALROS-1:/mnt/c/Users/alros/Documents/empty1$ code-insiders .
events.js:167
      throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
      ^

Error: spawn cmd.exe ENOENT
    at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (internal/child_process.js:232:19)
    at onErrorNT (internal/child_process.js:407:16)
    at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:63:19)
Emitted 'error' event at:
    at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (internal/child_process.js:238:12)
    at onErrorNT (internal/child_process.js:407:16)
    at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:63:19)

[aeschli]

fixed by microsoft/vscode@49b51b3

[weinand]

@aeschli After removing /mnt/c/WINDOWS/system32 from the WSL PATH, "code" and "code-insiders" starts up fine, but the following message shows up in the terminal:

wsl.exe not found on PATH, unable to probe wheter this is the default distro

IMO the message is self-explanatory (but contains a typo "wheter").