No /mnt/hgfs in Ubuntu guest under VMWare Fusion

sudo mkdir /mnt/hgfs

Use the above command first, followed by the following:

sudo /usr/bin/vmhgfs-fuse .host:/ /mnt/hgfs -o subtype=vmhgfs-fuse,allow_other

I am using macOS and VMware Fusion with Ubuntu 18.x.

For some reason, the auto-installed VMWare tools didn't do the job, but Ubuntu has a tool called vmware-hgfsmounter, if I installed it then I could do this:

sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools
sudo mkdir /mnt/hgfs
sudo mount -t vmhgfs .host:/ /mnt/hgfs

After running these commands, /mnt/hgfs should now contain your shares.

For Ubuntu 16.04 I had to use vmhgfs-fuse, see https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools/issues/199#issuecomment-335525133:

This impacts the Shared Folders client as we have switched from a kernel mode component to a FUSE file system component to provide the Shared Folders file system.

This results in a new mount command to be used for creating the shared file system. For Linux kernel versions we use the FUSE file system which will now mean you should be using the following command:

sudo /usr/bin/vmhgfs-fuse .host:/ /mnt/hgfs -o subtype=vmhgfs-fuse,allow_other

I was having the same problem, not being able to mount hgfs at all. I tried re-installing vmware-tools, then I tried installing vm-open-vm-tools and still no joy. I did notice that when I tried install open-vm-tools and reinstalling vm-ware-tools via vmware-install.pl, I got a failure notice for invalid gcc headers path. You can try this by installing vmware-tools without the -d switch for defaults. You will see the notice for the invalid path. I install headers with apt-get, you may or may not need to create a link to version.h. If version.h exists in /usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r)/include/linux/, skip that step.

sudo apt-get install gcc make linux-headers-$(uname -r)

sudo ln -s /usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r)/include/generated/uapi/linux/version.h /usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r)/include/linux/

Installed the headers, I uninstalled open-vm-tools and reinstalled vmware tools using vmware-install.pl. This time hgfs was mounted correctly and my shared folder is there as well. Re-booted and it is still there.