WSL handy commands

Often WSL2 does not work well anymore, and those commands have saved me some time and headaches.

If you have messed-up something (e.g. sudo), login to the WSL as root (from windows CMD)

C:\>wsl -u root

Restart WSL2, sometimes needed when you can't connect from your windows to the servicess runing on it (e.g. to access a localhost website running on WSL)

C:\>wsl --shutdown

Increase limit of open files

WSL does not support to do it the usual way, so this is what it works for me (ubuntu and WSL2). Source: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4575

$ mylimit=200000
$ sudo prlimit --nofile=$mylimit --pid $$; ulimit -n $mylimit

In case of panic

If things are very very wrong, and wsl does not respond, not even with restarts. Try this

With admin permissions on a powershell:

taskkill /F /IM wslhost.exe
taskkill /F /IM wsl.exe
taskkill /F /IM wslservice.exe
net stop LxssManager
net start LxssManager
net stop vmcompute
net start vmcompute

net stop hvhost
net start hvhost

And restart the computer