wsl --import reports Access Denied

[vjancik]

Environment

Windows build number: 10.0.19041.0
Your Distribution version: both Ubuntu 18.04 and latest 20.04
Whether the issue is on WSL 2 and/or WSL 1: WSL2

Steps to reproduce

wsl --export Ubuntu-20.04 E:\Distros\ubuntu2004.tar
wsl --import Ubuntu2004 E:\Distros\ubuntu2004.tar E:\Distros\Ubuntu2004
or
wsl --import Ubuntu2004 .\ubuntu2004.tar C:\WSLTest

Expected behavior

WSL distro installs in specified directory and registers

Actual behavior

Commands reports Access denied.

Previous issues

#4451
MicrosoftDocs/WSL#412

Additional notes

The 18.04 distro has been used and the .tar file size is 12.8GB, in the production of that tar file vmmem process starts up and uses 13GB of memory at peak. 20.04 is only 1GB (empty), but both distros fail to import.

[0xbadfca11]

The command line arguments are in the wrong order.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/reference#arguments-for-managing-windows-subsystem-for-linux

[vjancik]

That's what I get for copying commands from GitHub issues. Thank you.

[AgentEnder]

Could this error messaging be improved? It would not be hard to check if the first arg points to a tar file.