On WSL, Claude Code now checks whether a path is on a Windows drive
On WSL, Claude Code reads the system's mount list to tell whether a path sits on a Windows-side drive, and file checks compare link counts and file IDs
Under the hoodTier: how much it should matter to you
1Useful: my rating, 1 to 5
1Signal: worth watching, 1 to 5
WindowsArea: what it touches
Internal ChangesKind: in v2.1.285,
Internal ChangesSection of the release
What
WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) lets you run Linux on a Windows computer, and from inside it you can reach your Windows drives. Claude Code now works out whether a path lives on one of those Windows-side drives. It does this by reading /proc/self/mountinfo, the list Linux keeps of every attached drive and the kind of filesystem each one uses.
A path counts as Windows-side or shared when it sits on a filesystem type such as:
drvfs, 9p and virtiofs, which WSL uses to share folders
ntfs, ntfs3, fuseblk, vfat, exfat and msdos, which are Windows disk formats
cifs, smb3, smbfs, nfs and nfs4, which are network shares
Path validation and file lookups also now compare each file's link count and its internal file ID number. They read these values at full precision, so very large numbers are not rounded off.
Why
This affects how Claude Code checks git paths before uploading them to the cloud when you work on WSL or on Windows drives. Files on Windows-side or network drives do not always behave like ordinary Linux files, so Claude Code now handles them as a separate case.
How sure we are
Something disagreesSomething we can check disagrees with this entry, or the writer said they could not settle it.
The writer flagged doubtIt is not clear what Claude Code does differently once it decides a path is on a Windows-side drive.
