I regularly use a WSL (Windows Linux subsystem) inside my Windows 11 laptop, in order to play with all the different linux technologies. One of the many cool features of WSL is that it can access all the disks of the underlying Windows machine by simply going into the /mnt folder:
However, even if I have a SMB share ,published from a local NAS and mounted as a local disk in the Windows machine:
The I: disk doesn’t appear by default in WSL.
There is however an easy fix for this. First, I create a mount point:
mkdir /mnt/i
I use the same letter used in Windows Explorer, so it’s easy to remember the location of files. They do not conflict as they don’t see each other, one mount only works in Windows, the other only in WSL.
Then, I mount the network share using drvfs:
mount -t drvfs \\\\172.27.217.200\\web /mnt/i
Please note the doubled backslashes, they are needed to tell bash the correct network address.
Now I can easily navigate the network share and use its resources:
