Shared folders in VirtualBox

Example using MacOSX host and CentOS guest

Install Guest Additions on the guest...
https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html

From the host command line run...
VBoxManage sharedfolder add <VM name> --name <share name> --hostpath <host directory>

For example...
VBoxManage sharedfolder add CentOS6.4 --name myshare --hostpath /Users/clarkeb/automation

Now you have the host mapped to a shared device on the guest. Now you need to mount that device within the guest OS to a point on the file system

mount -t vboxsf  <share name>  <empty directory>

For example

mount -t vboxsf  myshare  /home/clarkeb/automation