[vbox-dev] Import Target Path Not Recognized

[Summers, James B. II]

Hello All,

I am using vb 3.2.8 on Intel iMac, Snow Leopard.  I am trying to set up some scripts to allow our students to import in some pre-made appliances.  The users home directory is mounted via nfs and I would like to keep the harddisk files in a local directory.  I initially tried the 'VBoxManage import' command to do this.  But in all of my attempts it keeps writing the harddisk file to ~/Library/VirtualBox/HardDisks.

I then tried to do the import in the GUI.  It has a text box that allows me to double click in it and change the path.  But it still writes the vmdk to the users home tree.

Ideally I would like to script the whole process so a student can sit down, open a terminal, and run my script that will either import a new appliance or remove one and copy a fresh one.  This is for a OS class and we would like them to be able to hack kernel code and settings.  So if they break it really bad it will be easy to put in a a fresh one.

The 'VBoxManage import -n' hints that the target path may be changeable but I can not get the syntax right I guess.

Does someone have an example or maybe import is the wrong way to do this?

Ideas / Suggestions?

TIA
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Jim Summers
School of Computer Science-University of Oklahoma