Why does VirtualBox keep launching on boot?

sorrybookbroke , 2 hours ago (edited 2 hours ago)

Edit: these suggestions are last resort type stuff tbf, hope the guys in the other thread are more help. Looks like someone suggested session restore w/ kde which makes alot of sense.

Ok that’s increadibly weird. Here’s some places I’d look.

I’d start looking in environment files such as /.bash_profile, ./.profile, /etc/environment, /etc/profile and a few others. Maybe there’s a call to the application in one of these files?

Secondly, I’d attempt to write a bash script to walk a directory tree, cat out files, pipe it through grep and get every instance where VirtualBox is mentioned in a file. Trying the name of proccess, or of the executable too.

I have a snippet that may help, by replacing that bash script:
grep -Rinw ‘~/path/to/start/’ -e ‘VirtualBoxOrSmthngElse’

all credit to this answer on SO:
stackoverflow.com/a/16957078/11534230

Head there to see how to try and wittle down the matches. I’d start in a etc, ignore binary files with grep, and try everywere systematically

This is likely overkill lol. If you’re on xorg maybe there’s something in the file xorg uses for init? Can’t remember the name personally but I used it to start up some processes before on system boot quite a while ago

FigMcLargeHuge , 2 hours ago

Secondly, I’d attempt to write a bash script to walk a directory tree, cat out files, pipe it through grep and get every instance where VirtualBox is mentioned in a file. Trying the name of proccess, or of the executable too.

Move to the top of the tree you want to search and do something like this:

find . -type f -exec grep -iH “virtualboxexecutable” {} ;

That will give you what you want without the need for a script. -type f makes the find command only search files, and -exec has it run the grep command on any files it returns with -iH giving you case insensitive results showing you the file it’s found in. Substitute ‘virtualboxexecutable’ with whatever the process name is that is being run. If you want to ignore binary files, the add in "| grep -iv “binary file matches” to the command. That will strip out any results where it has searched a binary file.