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I just did this

VBoxManage export foo_to_be_export --output bar.ova

But then I forgot to setup the default path. However, it shows it's 100%. I couldn't find this image now.

I tried

sudo find / -name bar.ova
sudo find . -name bar.ova

and none finds anything.

The first one seems to take forever (8 mins already...) so I just stopped it.

Does anyone know the default path? How can I find out?

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  • 1
    Run the export again, and see if it tell you anything.
    – Mitch
    Jun 7, 2012 at 18:22
  • On Export Appliance-> NameofVM -> Next your export path will be displayed, just cancel then and see if it's there.
    – Takkat
    Jun 7, 2012 at 18:36
  • Thanks. It is now in home directory. But the first one was not. It was missing... and also, the output was the same Jun 7, 2012 at 18:36

3 Answers 3

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When I used the example you've given, substituting one of my virtual box vms like so:

chris@4314-APPWP:~$ VBoxManage export "Ubuntu LTP" --output bar.ova

The bar.ova file was generated in my home directory.

chris@4314-APPWP:~$ ls -lah bar.ova 
-rw------- 1 chris chris 1.3G Jun  7 14:26 bar.ova
chris@4314-APPWP:~$ pwd
/home/chris
chris@4314-APPWP:~$

Hope this helps!

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  • I tried it again and it is in home directory. But the one I did first time was missing. The image is 1.9GB, and we run backup on this machine. It will be a disaster to not find out if it has been created or not. Is there a better find/grep command that I am not familiar with that can trace down? I tried *.ova as well..... Thanks Jun 7, 2012 at 18:35
  • @user1012451 Besides \*.ova (because if there are .ova files in the current directory, the shell will expand *.ova into a space-delimited list of them, and then the output of find will be strictly limited to those files instead of any other .ova files anywhere) ...you can also try -iname instead of -name (in case there is differing capitalization in the filename or .ova suffix). Jun 7, 2012 at 18:48
  • @itnet 7 Thank you for your help. Jun 7, 2012 at 19:16
1

Doing find on / will search everything on your computer, including any mounted drives. To prevent this from happening, run:

find / -xdev -name bar.ova

By the way, you only need to run it with sudo if you ran the VBoxManage --export ... command with sudo. Otherwise, it's extremely unlikely that VBoxManage could have created a file somewhere you can't read from. You'll get plenty of "access denied" messages running find on / without sudo ...but that's not really a problem. If you want to log the results (but not error messages) to a file in your home directory, you can do this:

find / -xdev -name bar.ova | tee -a ~/find-results.log

If you have a separate partition for /home (which only happens if you set it up that way when you install Ubuntu, or deliberately migrate /home to a separate partition after installation), then find on / with -xdev won't search /home (which contains your home directory). The simplest and easiest solution to this is to do a separate find operation on /home:

find /home -xdev -name bar.ova

Or just on your home directory in /home, if you don't think you could've put it in another user's home directory:

find ~ -xdev -name bar.ova

You may want to leave off -xdev in these cases, though it's possible you (or other users) have FUSE or GVFS shares mounted inside home directories. (It's also possible a file got saved into one of those shares...)

With -xdev, when running find on /, it will still take a while, but it will complete eventually.

Something else you may want to try is to run sudo updatedb, wait for that to finish, and then run locate bar.ova.

1
  • Thanks for the complete walk through with various commands here. I tried updatedb as well but it shows only one. I guess something went really bad that it is now missing. I guess for now I will give up on that. Thanks. Jun 7, 2012 at 19:16
0

To find a file that's lost somewhere on your filesystem, run the following commands.

sudo updatedb
locate filename.ext

Explanation

updatedb - Updates the database used by locate.
locate - You guessed it. It locates files.

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