How do I check virtualbox version from CLI

To print or view the current VirtualBox version you should use below command:

vboxmanage --version

which will then print the current version as seen below;

Refer 8.2. Command overview at the official VirtualBox site for more.

To print the version using the script, see below:

#!/bin/bash
echo $(vboxmanage --version)

Hope it helps.

You can try this,

virtualbox --help | head -n 1 | awk '{print $NF}'

or

$ echo $(virtualbox --help | head -n 1 | awk '{print $NF}')
4.3.6

How it works

Step -1

virtualbox --help

gives you a long output saying many options etc. But its very first lines are like,

Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager 4.3.6
(C) 2005-2013 Oracle Corporation
All rights reserved.
...

Step -2

| head -n 1

| is called pipe. It has great application in command line. It passes the whole expression to the next command head. head -n 1 prints the first line only. see man head for more. At this stage output is only

Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager 4.3.6

Step -3

| awk '{print $NF}'

Again the remaining things are passed to awk. At this stage awk sees the whole line as combinations of few fields separated by space and prints only the last field of the above expression. So you get the version only. See man awk for more.

you could know the version of package installed with dpkg and grep with piping

dpkg -l | grep virtualbox | awk '{print $3}'

avi@avi-IdeaPad-Z500:~$ virtualbox --help
Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager 4.3.6

So run the below command,

virtualbox --help | awk '/Oracle/{ print $5 }'

Output:

4.3.6

awk '/Oracle/{ print $5 }'

Searches for the line which consists of the word Oracle .If yes then the command picks up the fifth column on that line and redirects it to standard output.If no such word was present on any lines,then it displays nothing.