How to run Obsidian CLI on WSL

Srinjoy Santra — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:33:02 +0000

My preferred dev terminal nowadays is WSL2 of Ubuntu. After installing Obsidian CLI on windows, I could not figure out how to run the new cli tool on WSL.

The following instruction does not work in WSL

obsidian help

However, the same works perfectly fine on Powershell or command prompt as the executable path is already added to environment variables path.

Usually windows path is imported into WSL.

echo $PATH

If not enable it in

nano ~/.wslconfig

Add

[interop]
appendWindowsPath=true

then restart wsl.

wsl --shutdown

Once your app is in the Windows PATH, you can run it by:

obsidian.exe

If you try running on WSL (in my case Ubuntu)

obsidian.exe help

the output appears all garbled now.

Reason

Windows executables output \r\n (CRLF) line endings, while Linux terminals expect \n (LF). The extra carriage return (\r) causes the cursor to jump back to the start of the line, producing messy output.

Quick Fix

Pipe the output through tr -d '\r' to strip carriage returns:

obsidian.exe 2>&1 | tr -d '\r'

Permanent Fix: Create a Wrapper Script

Instead of typing the pipe every time, create a wrapper script:

mkdir -p ~/bin

Create ~/bin/obsidian with the following content:

#!/bin/bash
obsidian.exe "$@" 2>&1 | tr -d '\r'

Make it executable and add ~/bin to your PATH:

chmod +x ~/bin/obsidian
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Now just run obsidian instead of obsidian.exe — clean output, every time.

How I take notes for YouTube videos

Srinjoy Santra — Sat, 07 Aug 2021 20:24:08 +0000

YiNote is a free Chrome extension to take notes as you watch through a YouTube video. It has saved me countless hours in going to and fro between two screens to take notes.

Despite being an incredible tool to keep your video notes organised in a single place, I really did not like the way it exports notes in markdown format.

I came across a blog by Nicole van der Hoeven about her YiNote to Roam Research Workflow. This inspired me to build a similar thing for markdown editors.

I wrote this quick dirty NodeJS implementation of it.

I run this script to use the exported json file from YiNote to turn all my video notes into a customised markdown format.

And the end result is this in Obsidian Editor!!

DEV Community: Srinjoy Santra

How to run Obsidian CLI on WSL

Reason

Quick Fix

Permanent Fix: Create a Wrapper Script

How I take notes for YouTube videos