VBoxManage showhdinfo deleted Virtual Machines

[JSM09A]

I was shocked to see that after running "VBoxManage showhdinfo <path_to_vdi>" two of my virtual machines had been deleted from the Graphical User Interface. I checked ~/.config/VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml and sure enough, the lines corresponding to those VMs had been removed from XML file.

I believe the source of my problem was that I moved those VM directories to a new location and placed a symbolic link from the previous directory location to the new directory. It appears that VirtualBox does not "like" files being moved to new locations with symbolic links (subject of a separate post) ... but in any case, my "intuition" would be that a utility (option) with the name "showhdinfo" should not update any configuration files, much less delete entire virtual machines without warning/clearance.

Is there some other option or configuration to VBoxManage that will prevent it from updating files ?

VirtualBox 7.0.10 running on Debian Bookworm host.

[scottgus1]

There's not a doubt that the symbolic link has something to do with this.

Vboxmanage showhdinfo does load the .vdi being identified into the Virtualbox configuration files, so the Virtual Media Manager can see it.

It's quite possible that Virtualbox is not programmed to parse symbolic links. A forum Linux guru will have to weigh in and say what the source code says and doesn't say.

We tell folks especially on Windows hosts to use the Move command for the disk file inside the main Virtualbox window. It would probably be good to do so on other hosts, so this sort of thing doesn't kill a VM.