#4 VirtualBox 3.1 Naming scheme

[Jason Ramey]

I noticed that when I had a USB printer plugged in and attached to a VM, I was unable to shutdown a given VM. I tracked it down to how the VM's name was being pulled out.

name=$($vbox_command showvminfo $uuid | grep "Name:" | awk 'BEGIN{FS="Name: "}{print $2}')

This returns 2 results in this variable when you have a USB device plugged in. Using the --machinereadable switch seems to work around that behavior. I've attached a diff that works for 3.1, I have no other version of VirtualBox to try with. I haven't looked to see when that switch was added.

[Jason Ramey]

[dude4linux]

I've been frustrated by this problem for awhile but just started looking into the cause. The problem is that in recent versions (3.?.?), showvminfo returns multiple lines starting with "Name:". Your suggestion of using --machinereadable works, but may not be compatible with earlier versions of VirtualBox. Since we are only interested in the first occurance of "Name:", the simplest fix is to pipe the vm info through 'head'.

name=$($vbox_command showvminfo $uuid | head | grep "Name:" | awk 'BEGIN{FS="Name: "}{print $2}')

I've only tested this with VirtualBox 3.1.6, but I'm guessing it would be backward compatible as long as the vm name appears in the first five lines of output.

[dude4linux]

I am still experiencing a problem managing an XP client running on Ubuntu with VirtualBox 3.1.6. With the suggested change to parse the output of showvminfo, I can login remotely via ssh and start/stop the virtual XP machine. However if I login via rdesktop and then shutdown the vm, I lose the ability to remotely restart it. After this happens, I can only restart the vm from a local session on the Ubuntu server. It isn't a problem with vboxtool, because VBoxManage won't restart the vm through ssh either. I only mention it here in case others are seeing the same problem.