[dfed]

Originally Posted by dfed

Ok. One line to output VM name and os:

for x in `VBoxManage list vms | grep '"' | cut -d'"' -f2 2>/dev/null`; do VBoxManage showvminfo "${x}" | egrep -e "Name:" -e "Guest OS:" |cut -b 10-64 |tr -d '\n'| awk '{print $1" "$2" "$3" "$4" "$5" "$6}'; done

which outputs like this:

redhatest Red Hat (64 bit) 
windowstest Windows XP (64 bit) 
opensolaristest OpenSolaris (64 bit)  
anothertest Windows 7 (64 bit) 
archtest Arch Linux (64 bit) 
bsdtest FreeBSD (64 bit)  
warptest OS/2 Warp 4.5

Working on the portion to determine which is running and append that file with that.

Ok got it. It's messy and horrible, and I am sure there is a better way to do this, but here's one way:

for x in `VBoxManage list vms | grep '"' | cut -d'"' -f2 | sort -u 2>/dev/null`; do VBoxManage showvminfo "${x}" | egrep -e "Name:" -e "Guest OS:" -e "State:" | cut -b 10-64 | tr -d '\n' | awk '{print $1" "$2" " $3" " $4" "$5" "$6" "$7" "$8" "$9" "$10}'| awk -F"\(since" '{print $1}'; done

which outputs:

chat Ubuntu (64 bit) running 
db Ubuntu (64 bit) running 
mail Ubuntu (64 bit) running 
nas Ubuntu (64 bit) running 
shell Ubuntu (64 bit) running 
web Ubuntu (64 bit) running

(on this machine, it's all ubuntu guests. the one I was on earlier has more variety. Both return correct answers.)

That allows you to have scripts that parse via grep and awk based on name, OS and whether the guest is running or not.

I should mention that if you create machine names with spaces in them, this breaks. I should also mention that this is all done in bash, which is much more clunky than if I did this in perl. I'll maybe look into rewriting it in perl later.

ETA:

Also modified the first script to start/stop/restart:

#!/bin/bash
#Written by dfed with no guarantee this pile of crap will work.
#script to start/stop/restart one or all VM's installed on system via VirtualBox
#
# If we've not had 2 variables passed in the command line, failboat has sailed.
if [[ "${#}" -lt 2 ]]; then
    echo "Usage: ${0} <start|stop|restart> <(vm name)|all>" >&2
    exit 1;
elif [[ "${#}" -gt 2 ]]; then
    echo "Usage: ${0} <start|stop|restart> <(vm name)|all>" >&2
    exit 1;
fi
# First, declare some arrays to use later:
declare -a list
	list=($(VBoxManage list vms | grep '"' | cut -d'"' -f2 | sort -u 2>/dev/null))
# Sanity check on ${1}:
if [[ "${1}" == "stop" ]]; then
	com=${1}
elif [[ "${1}" == "start" ]]; then
	com=${1}
elif [[ "${1}" == "restart" ]]; then
	com=${1}
else echo "Usage: ${0} <start|stop|restart> <(vm name)|all>" >&2; exit 1;
fi
# Sanity check on ${2}:
checkvm=($(for z in ${list[@]}; do echo ${z} | grep ${2}; done))
if [[ "${2}" == ${checkvm} ]]; then
	vm=${2}
elif [[ "${2}" == "all" ]]; then 
	vm=${list[@]}
else echo "Virtual Machine ${2} not found.  Exiting." >&2; exit 1;
fi
echo "Working to ${com} ${vm[@]}"
# Let's do some work.
if [[ "${com}" == "start" ]]; then 
	for x in ${vm[@]}; do nohup VBoxHeadless --startvm ${x} 2> /dev/null > /dev/null &
		echo "Started VM ${x}"
	done
elif [[ "${com}" == "stop" ]]; then
	for x in ${vm[@]}; do VBoxManage controlvm ${x} poweroff 2>&1 > /dev/null
		echo "Stopped VM ${x}"
	done
elif [[ "${com}" == "restart" ]]; then
	for x in ${vm[@]}; do VBoxManage controlvm ${x} poweroff 2>&1 > /dev/null && nohup VBoxHeadless --startvm ${x} 2> /dev/null > /dev/null &
		echo "Restarted VM ${x}"
	done
fi
exit 0