Question

I want to loop through my running VM’s and return only what is between quotes.

So this command:

VBoxManage list runningvms

returns:

"UbuntuServer" {7ef01f8d-a7d5-4405-af42-94d85f999dff}

And I only want it to return:

UbuntuServer

This is what i have so far (fail):

#!/bin/bash
for machine in `cat VBoxManage list runningvms`; do
        echo "$machine"
done
exit

Answer 1

Warning: all of this is is risky if your VM names have shell glob characters in them, or contain spaces.

---

You can do something like this if there is only one running VM:

read machine stuff <<< $(VBoxManage list runningvms)
echo "$machine"

Alternative with bash arrays (same condition):

vbm=($(VBoxManage list runningvms))
echo "${vbm[0]}"

If that program returns more than one line, a more classic approach would be:

for machine in $(VBoxManage list runningvms|cut -d" " -f 1); do
  echo "$machine"
done