Hi Bernard,
On 2021-11-04 09:11, Bernard Giannetti wrote:
Hi Stéphane, fth0, Klaus,
Thanks for your responses. I have done some digging/reading...
Looking at
https://www.virtualbox.org/browser/vbox/trunk/src/VBox/Frontends/VirtualBox/src/manager/chooser/UIChooserAbstractModel.cpp
and the functions prefixToString() and optionToString(), I see the
characters that define group and machine, but there are some other
characters which don't make sense...but that I don't believe affects
my situation. That 'gc' and 'go' both refer to groups, that fixes my
immediate issue.
Longer term, I will ditch parsing the XML configuration file as this
is chasing my tail at best! After some investigation, I believe I can
use:
VBoxManage list vms --long
to give me each machine's name, UUID and group. Hopefully this works
as expected as this is preferable to calling the API via a COM wrapper
or the web server interface.
My recommendation would be using the Python API bindings since that's
rather convenient, balancing flexibility with pretty limited impact from
API changes (that said, the Python API bindings may not be available in
a certain VirtualBox installation, depending on how annoying the support
of a specific Linux distro's Python 2/3 migration strategy is).
If you insist using "VBoxManage" (one of the main source of useless
error reports e.g. from Vagrant fans) then I would at least hope you go
for an approach which will be a little more reliable ("VBoxManage list
vms --long" produces human readable output, i.e. it can change
relatively arbitrarily): go for a two-stage approach. First get the list
of VM UUIDs with "VBoxManage list vms", and then get the detail
information you need with "VBoxManage showvminfo uuid
--machinereadable". The output of the latter should be a lot easier to
process. It is kind of a list of shell variables (anything with an all
lowercase name is the associated VBoxManage modifyvm option name,
anything mixed case has no direct correspondence), with string values
possibly containing spaces in "".
In principle this could be also offered with "VBoxManage list vms
--long", but so far no one has thought of this and therefore it wouldn't
work for existing VirtualBox releases.
Klaus
Thanks again for the help,
Bernard.
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