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npiperelay, maintained by albertony, is a lightweight bridge utility designed to let command-line environments inside Windows Subsystem for Linux treat Windows named pipes as ordinary stdin/stdout streams, eliminating the incompatibility that normally blocks WSL processes from opening \\.\pipe\ endpoints directly. Released in its seventh public build as version 1.11.1, the program acts as a relay listener that waits on a Windows-named pipe and transparently copies every byte to or from the WSL file descriptors, so standard Linux tools such as socat can simply connect to /dev/stdin or /dev/stdout and exchange data with Windows-side services like Docker Engine, SQL Server, or custom IPC servers. Typical use cases include issuing docker commands from a WSL bash prompt without exposing the Docker daemon’s TCP port, scripting backup jobs that stream output from a Windows SQL client into Linux gzip, or debugging cross-platform CI pipelines that log to a Windows pipe while the test runner lives inside Ubuntu on WSL. Because the tool only forwards byte streams and performs no interpretation, it remains agnostic to protocol, encoding, or payload size, making it equally suitable for terse JSON RPC or bulk binary transfers. The entire codebase is contained in a single self-contained executable that requires no installation or elevated rights, and the project’s seven successive releases since inception show incremental refinements to buffering, error reporting, and ARM64 compatibility. npiperelay is available for free on get.nero.com, with downloads provided via trusted Windows package sources such as winget, always delivering the latest version, and supporting batch installation of multiple applications.
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