Trouble locating my serial ports using bash on Windows 10

Soon, Windows will officially support serial on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). The COM_n_ ports will be available at /dev/ttyS_n_

Mapping:

COM1 >> /dev/ttyS0COM2 >> /dev/ttyS1...COM192 >> /dev/ttyS191

A good functional description can be found here:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2017/04/14/serial-support-on-the-windows-subsystem-for-linux/

NOTE: At time of writing this feature is only available on the insider builds.

I have the same problem. Apparently you still can`t use serial ports in Bash on Ubuntu on Windows (BoUoW). You can do basic read and write operations using socat. I used Cygwin to create a socat server that sees my serial ports. I had problems with DTR and RTS pins though.

With socat you can create virtual serial ports or forward a serial port over TCP. (And much more.)

In Cygwin serial ports are listed under /dev/ as ttyS*. For example COM3 is /dev/ttyS2 and COM4 is /dev/ttyS3.

Start the server in Cygwin with

socat -d -d -d TCP4-LISTEN:2022,reuseaddr,fork /dev/ttyS3

Start the client on BoUoW with

socat PTY,link=/tmp/vmodem0 TCP:localhost:2022

This will create a virtual serial port in BoUoW at /tmp/vmodem0 that is connected to COM4 on your machine.