<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body>
Hi Bernard,<br>
<br>
On 2021-11-04 09:11, Bernard Giannetti wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:RO1PR80MB4300F3288E9DECF7B4E9FFB9DC8D9@RO1PR80MB4300.lamprd80.prod.outlook.com">
<style type="text/css" style="display:none;">P {margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;}</style>
<div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:
10pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
Hi Stéphane, <span style="font-family:"Segoe UI",
"Segoe UI Web (West European)", "Segoe
UI", -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Roboto,
"Helvetica Neue",
sans-serif;font-size:14px;background-color:rgb(255, 255,
255);display:inline !important">fth0</span>, Klaus,</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:
10pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
<br>
</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:
10pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
Thanks for your responses. I have done some digging/reading...</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:
10pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
<br>
</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:
10pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
Looking at</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:
10pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
<span style="background-color:rgb(255, 255,
255);display:inline !important"><a href="https://www.virtualbox.org/browser/vbox/trunk/src/VBox/Frontends/VirtualBox/src/manager/chooser/UIChooserAbstractModel.cpp" moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.virtualbox.org/browser/vbox/trunk/src/VBox/Frontends/VirtualBox/src/manager/chooser/UIChooserAbstractModel.cpp</a></span> </div>
<div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:
10pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
<br>
</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:
10pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
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.<br>
</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:
10pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
<br>
</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:
10pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
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:</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:
10pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
<div><br>
</div>
<div> VBoxManage list vms --long<br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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.</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
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).<br>
<br>
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 "".<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Klaus<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:RO1PR80MB4300F3288E9DECF7B4E9FFB9DC8D9@RO1PR80MB4300.lamprd80.prod.outlook.com">
<div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:
10pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Thanks again for the help,</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div class="moz-signature">Bernard.<font size="2" face="Verdana,
Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#666666"><!-- This signature was generated by the MyDesktop Oracle Business Signature utility version 6.0 -->
</font></div>
</div>
</blockquote>
</body>
</html>