I just came up with a way to start a Oracle VirtualBox VM with bash. Here is the code.
#!/bin/bash vmname='Windows10' cnt=$(VBoxManage showvminfo $vmname | grep -c 'running (since') if [ $cnt -gt 0 ]; then logger "$vmname VM is already running" else logger "Starting $vmname VM..." VBoxManage startvm $vmname --type headless logger "$vmname VM started successfully" fi
The line #3 checks if it can find ‘running (since’ string in the standard output after running VBoxManage showvminfo $vmname and it assigns the occurrence count to cnt variable.
logger is the command you use to write log to /var/log/syslog. If the cnt value is greater than 0 (a positive number), it writes out a message indicating that it’s already running in /var/log/syslog.
If it detects the VM is not running, it executes VBoxManage startvm $vmname –type headless to start the virtual machine.
This bash script could be run on startup or periodically in crontab or just be executed by hand.
Edit: If you add the following line to your crontab -e, it automatically starts the VM on startup.
@reboot /path/toyour/script/start-win10.sh
Enjoy!