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I am running Windows 10 as my host OS, using Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager 6.0.8 as my virtual machine software, and Ubuntu 18.04.2 is my guest OS. I am trying to set up folder and file sharing.

I went to the settings for my virtual machine (on Oracle VM VirtualBox) and created a new, shared folder. When setting it up I checked off auto-mounting and make permanent. However, when I open up my files in Ubuntu I see the folder but am unable to open it. When I click on it, I get an error that says: This location could not be displayed. Then in smaller letters underneath it says: you do not have the permissions necessary to view the contents of "shared_folder_I_created".

I was googling and came across this link: https://helpdeskgeek.com/virtualization/virtualbox-share-folder-host-guest/. It explained that to set up a shared folder I should do everything I did, but then to (additionally) run the following line in terminal: 

mount -t vboxsf [-o OPTIONS] sharename mountpoint

Then it said:

Replace sharename with the name of the share and mountpoint with the path where you want the share to be mounted (i.e. /mnt/share).

This seems to indicate that I did not properly mount this folder, despite having checked off auto-mount when I originally created this folder.

Anyway, I tried running this in terminal but received an error: 

mount: only root can use "--types" option

This seems like it might be a simple sudo fix. However, because I don't know what this command means, I wanted to first figure out what it does.

So really I have two questions:

  1. What does each part of this command mean?
  2. How do I fix the error I am receiving when I try to run it?
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mount -t vboxsf [-o OPTIONS] sharename mountpoint

-t vboxsf - pseudofilesystem that provides *Shared folder mechanism between host and guest systems. You should install guest additions before use this filesystem. Helpful tutorial about guest additions installation is located at this link.

-o OPTIONS - list of options that can help or specify behaviour of mounted resource (i.e. uid, gid ...). Set of this option depends on type of filesystem that you mount.

sharename - name/source of resource that should be mounted (name of shared folder in your case).

mountpoint - destionation directory in which your resource will be available after mounting.

Full details about mount command you can achieve from man 8 mount.

More info about vboxsf and their OPTIONS you can achieve from man 8 mount.vboxsf.

Yout should mount resources with superuser privileges. So you should being root user or run mount in sudo mount ... style.

Read more about sudo in man 8 sudo.

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