VBM clonevm fails to recognise tilda as home directory

[ndastur]

If a virtual machine is cloned using

VBoxManage clonevm Machine2Clone \
  --mode=all --name=NewVMName --basefolder=~/VBox/NewVMName --register

The machine will get cloned into

.VirtualBox/~/VBox/NewVMName

So the initial tilda in basefolder is not translated into the user home directory as is expected.

[Frank Mehnert]

The correct syntax is to insert a space between option and parameter instead of '=':

VBoxManage clonevm Machine2Clone \
  --mode all --name NewVMName --basefolder ~/VBox/NewVMName --register

If you use the syntax with '=' then the shell will not detect that this parameter has to be properly extracted. The '=' form is undocumented. It sometimes works in VBoxManage (but not always).