Rebooting Ubuntu on Windows without rebooting Windows?

Shutdown everything: Build 18917+

wsl.exe --shutdown

Terminate specific distro: Windows 1903+

wsl.exe -t <DistroName>

Older versions

# PowerShell (admin)
Restart-Service LxssManager

# or CMD (admin)
net stop LxssManager
net start LxssManager

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At an administrative PowerShell prompt: Restart-Service LxssManager


Since Windows 10 version 1803, closing all WSL terminal windows won't kill background processes by default, unless the file /var/run/reboot-required is present. This file will be automatically created by apt on Ubuntu when an update requires a reboot, but if you want to manually reboot the subsystem, you can create the file yourself:

sudo touch /var/run/reboot-required

I haven't tested this on other distributions available in the Microsoft Store. An alternative solution is to kill all processes yourself:

sudo killall -r '.*'

Tags:

Windows Subsystem For Linux

Windows 10

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