I don't think the question needs a lot of clarification, especially when you see what I tried:

wsl -l -q --running | Where{$_ -ne ""} | ForEach {Write-Output "Distro $_"; wsl -d $_ -e ls; Write-Output "/// $_"}

I wanted/expected the above to write "Distro (distribution name)" on the console, then execute ls on that distribution, and then write "/// (distribution name)" on the console at the end, for each active VM. The part that doesn't work is the ls – instead of executing ls, I get the generic help message from wsl.

I think I'm not escaping something properly, because if I try to deliberately mangle the command by removing the distro name parameter (i.e. wsl -d -e ls instead of wsl -d $_ -e ls) I get a sensible error message (There is no distribution with the supplied name.) instead of the generic help message.

On the other hand, if I just run wsl -d Ubuntu-20.04 -e ls manually in a console, that behaves as expected.

What am I doing wrong?

CodePudding user response：

It turns out my problem was caused by wsl. Amazingly, it spits out the distro names in a bizarre encoding, which it then refuses when that gets fed back to it. Check it out:

wsl -l | Format-Hex

My solution (at least for the time being) is to just remove null characters from wsl's output:

(wsl -l) -replace "`0", "" | Format-Hex

looks much better.

We just have to use this trick in our original script:

(wsl -l -q --running) -replace "`0", "" | Where{$_ -ne ""} | ForEach {Write-Output "Distro $_"; wsl -d $_ -e ls; Write-Output "/// $_"}