How to edit fstab to mount bind a directory that have spaces in the PATH at start in wsl2

Question

I am currently using wsl2 on windows and I use MS OneDrive locally in parallel for my studies. Actually I sync each file with my OneDrive account. AS my Onedrive folder's name is like :

Onedrive - SchoolName

And that for my courses I need to use WSL2 and I want to acceed to my windows file without the spaces in the path. The solution I found is to use mount bind command :

sudo mount --bind /mnt/c/Users/MyName/OneDrive\ -\ SchoolName/Project ~/Project/

This is actually working but I want to edit my fstab to not type the command each time I start my WSL. And I do not know how to do because each tuto I found wasn't working.

Thank you for your tips !

Answer 1

fstab(5) documents that \040 can be used to substitute a space… but only in the second field; you have it in the first field.

A quick workaround is to make a symlink to the source directory somewhere, then bind-mount that:

sudo ln -s /mnt/c/Users/MyName/OneDrive\ -\ SchoolName/Project /.onedrive-link

Then you can bind-mount /.onedrive-link to ~/Project/.

---

At this point, the obvious question is, do you still need the bind mount? You can just do:

sudo rmdir ~/Project
ln -s /mnt/c/Users/MyName/OneDrive\ -\ SchoolName/Project ~/Project

You’ll end up with a symlink that’s even owned by your regular user and doesn’t need superuser privilegues to be modified.

Answer 2

try this:

what I did on my fedora 35 was open disks and edit their mount options. unfortunately, wsl doesn't provide GUI so I'll do my best to give you an example based on my own fstab

/mnt/c/Users/MyName/OneDrive / ntfs-3g defaults,bind 0 0

the bind option should do the trick

Answer 3

if you can't use disks, you have use terminal file editor nano

$ sudo nano /etc/fstab
#at the end of document
/source /destination none defaults,bind 0 0

I myself don't use defaults option I recommend these:

/mnt/c/Users/MyName/OneDrive /home/(your username)/Project nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show,uid=1000,gid=1000,dmask=027,fmask=137,bind 0 0

if it worked make sure to tell us.

EDIT 1:

I know it's been a long time but I think The Situation does not need an interference anymore. right now I'm an windows 11 insider (Build 25115) and with Hyper-V active and Hypervisor Disabled. I can see my Ubuntu WSL on explorer and if I have permissions I can write to it. and the drives are automatically mounted. this is my fstab (almost empty):

LABEL=cloudimg-rootfs   /    ext4   defaults    0 1

and this is my /mnt (using ls command from Ubuntu WSL):

mohsentux@LovelyBloom:/mnt$ ls
c  d  e  f  wsl  wslg

so the situation has officially resolved itself so to speak.