Thanks to this I can happily run the following two commands to attach to the serial consoleĩ 01:08:00 socat N opening connection to LEN=16 AF=1 './Thesis.ttyS0'ĩ 01:08:00 socat N successfully connected from local address LEN=16 AF=1 ''ĩ 01:08:00 socat N successfully connected viaĩ 01:08:00 socat N PTY is /dev/ttys007ĩ 01:08:00 socat N starting data transfer loop with FDs and

I also found a couple VMware forum posts with useful links. There were some pages describing how to use socat to map a UNIX domain socket to a tty device (actually a PTY).

The screen man page describe how to attach to a existing tty device but the file is a named pipe so the program cannot do its magic with it. I tried the nc -U variant as stated in the page but I had no luck making it work because the mac ports version of netcat does *not* support attaching to UNIX domain sockets. VirtualBox (and VMware for what I saw on the pages ) map the serial device of the virtual machine to a 'Named Pipe' (actually a UNIX Domain Socket) which can be accessed using netcat or minicom. I normally access a VirtualBox VM serial console through minicom in GNU/Linux, but for some reason it didn't worked on Mac OS X, so I researched about how can I access the serial console.

Linux virtualbox mac os x