WSL: Run SysInternals Utilities without Installing Them

This short blog post explains how you can use SysInternals Live to run its utilities from Windows and Windows Subsystem for Linux shells without explicitly downloading or installing them.

In a Windows shell , you can invoke SysInternals Live utilities such as:

\\live.sysinternals.com\tools\handle

You can use cmd.exe /c to invoke SysInternals Live utilities from a Windows Subsystem for Linux shell Window. For example, to see what processes own file handles, you can run:

cmd.exe /c '\\live.sysinternals.com\tools\handle.exe'  

Here you can see the Windows process ID of the EXCEL.EXE process that owns a handle on a file.