Ubuntu – Save in gedit without ~ in virtualbox

You may suffer from bug #34813, where access to shares on Windows systems is broken. Access to files on Ubuntu hosts is not affected.

Troubleshoot Shared Folders in Virtual Box

To investigate if your shared folders are setup correctly you may go through the following steps:

• Install the latest release of Virtual Box.

• Make sure Guest Additions meet your VBox release.

• Not define shared folders as read-only if you need write access.

• Guest users need to be in the group vboxsf for auto-mounted shares.

• Mount temporary shares with option rw and appropriate uid for write access,

  (e.g. sudo mount -t vboxsf -o uid=1000 sharename mountpoint)

I experienced the same issue. My setup: VirtualBox 4.2.12 with Ubuntu 13.04 guest running on W7SP1 host, mounted Windows folder with fstab like this

dev /home/dregad/dev    vboxsf  auto,rw,uid=dregad,gid=dregad,umask=0022,dmode=0755,fmode=0644  0   0

I'm using Geany. Saving the file fails with similar symptoms as described in the question above for gedit (which fails too). Error message as follows:

Error saving file.
Error renaming temporary file: Text file busy
The file on disk may now be truncated!

My solution for Geany:

• Edit / Preferences
• Select Various tab
• scroll down and check the box for use_atomic_file_saving
• click OK

I don't use it much, so not sure if gedit provides a similar trick, but FWIW, you may want to have a look at this stackexchange question as it offers a workaround.