constantly check if the virtualbox is started or still booting up from a script

Question

I am writing a shell script to start a virtualbox (ubuntu). After the command I want to put a for loop to keep checking the status of virtualbox and the script comes out of the loop only after the ubuntu is fully started. Something like

vboxmanage starvm Ubuntu

for (i= 0; i < 100; i++)
{
continue if (vbox is not on)
}

exit when vbox is fully on and execute the next command

Solution

We can use VBoxManage to query the state of a Virtual Machine. The following command will list all running virtual machines on your system:

VBoxManage list runningvms

The output will show you the following information which you can then further parse in your script:

"name_of_machine" <UUID>

This will of course not tell you whether the guest OS had booted properly, or is ready to use. For such informations you may need to run a script on the guest starting after boot to send it's running state to the host.

Comments

[Mian Asbat Ahmad]

Actually I want to know if there is any command from which we can check the status of the machine because after Ubuntu is booted, I want ssh connection to it.

[Mian Asbat Ahmad]

Yes you are right for that purpose we need to have a script inside the guest OS. They also suggest the same thing forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=50241. Since my next command in the script is to ssh the guest OS after boot therefore I will check if I add it in the loop and continue untill connection is established to the guest os.