How to call PowerShell script from WSL?

In WSL2, using the -File option worked for me:

powershell.exe -File path/to/script.ps1

There are two ways to go about this:

1. You can change your working directory to that of your shell script and execute it normally. To do so, follow these steps:

• Mount the relevant drive cd /mnt/c/.
• Change directories according to the path of the script.

2. This approach is more of a hack that I use for the sake of convenience. I have created a folder in my Windows storage wherein I store all Ubuntu WSL related files. Say, D:\Ubuntu. To avoid changing the working directory every time you open WSL, you can modify the shell profile file (bashrc, zshrc etc.) to load the relevant directory at the end.

• i.e., Add cd /mnt/d/Ubuntu/ at the end of your ~/.zshrc file if you use zsh or the relevant profile file otherwise.

When running wsl (or wsl.exe) from PowerShell, it should start in the same directory that you were in under PowerShell, just with the Linux version of it. For instance, if you are in PowerShell in C:\Users\jholmes\pichak\analytics, and you run wsl, you should end up in /mnt/c/Users/jholmes/pichak/analytics.

If not, then you may have something in your startup file already like the other answer recommend. You should remove any cd commands from your .bashrc, .zshrc, .profile, .bash_profile, or any other startup file you may have edited.

The wsl command provides a few handy arguments for specifying the starting directory:

• wsl ~ will start in your Linux user's home directory (e.g. /home/jholmes)
• wsl --cd c:\ will start in /mnt/c (or whatever the equivalent Linux directory is to the Windows version passed in).
• wsl --cd \\wsl$\<distroname>\etc will start in your /etc directory (or whatever WSL path you passed in. Note that you will need to specific your distribution name (obtained from wsl -l -v).

Let's say that you are in /home/jholmes, and you want to execute the PowerShell script C:\Users\jholmes\pichak\analytics\run1.ps1. You first need to translate the Windows path to the Linux version:

/mnt/c/Users/jholmes/pichak/analytics/run1.ps

You can then run it via:

powershell.exe /mnt/c/Users/jholmes/pichak/analytics/run1.ps

It's also possible to set up a PowerShell script with a "shebang" line to execute it directly. If you add the following as the first line of run1.ps1:

#!/usr/bin/env -S powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass

Then set it to be executable via chmod +x /mnt/c/Users/jholmes/pichak/analytics/run1.ps, then it becomes a "command" of sorts (technically, an "executable script") that you can execute directly by just typing the fully qualified name of the script at the command line:

/mnt/c/Users/jholmes/pichak/analytics/run1.ps

or

cd /mnt/c/Users/jholmes/pichak/analytics
./run1.ps

Here is the evidence, that with the WSL2, our software can make the Powershell script encrypted and protected: See this picture:

And it can detect and kill the process that uses fanotify because we think it can be used by attackers to hide critical file change (it also can find and kill dtrace/strace/stap/bpftrace/debuggers and process that opens /dev/kmem, /dev/mem, /proc/kcore, and the protected process' /proc/pid/mem etc): This picture shows the encrypted PowerShell script now can detect and kill possible attackers' processes

For me this answer was almost the good one but when running for instance:

powershell.exe -File /mnt/c/path/to/script/script.ps1

I got following error:

The argument '/mnt/c/path/to/script/script.ps1' to the -File parameter does not exist. Provide the path to an existing '.ps1' file as an argument to the -File parameter.

I then have to:

cd /mnt/c/path/to/script
powershell.exe -File script.ps1