Gawk provides built-in networking support. The gawk manual has some examples, for basic UDP-communication at [1]. The classical sender/receiver code snippets are as follows: # Server BEGIN { print strftime() |& “/inet/udp/8888/0/0” close(“/inet/udp/8888/0/0”) } # Client BEGIN { “/inet/udp/0/localhost/8888” |& getline print $0 close(“/inet/udp/0/localhost/8888”) } Unfortunately these examples did not work on my test system …

From the official documentation it is not very clear, how to install the guest additions necessary to use shared folders. Here’s how it works: VirtualBox Guest Additions is a .iso file, that can be downloaded from here (for version 4.6.3): http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.3.6/ The file in question is  “VBoxGuestAdditions_4.6.3.iso”. Download it and burn it onto a CD. …