Either I'm hitting a bug in Shared Folders, or I'm doing something horribly wrong...
I have VMware Fusion 4 installed on OS X 10.7.1. Within Fusion, I have OS X 10.7.1 installed in a VM. Within the VM, I have installed the VMware tools (via Virtual Machine > Install VMware Tools), and in the VM settings I have added my home folder as a shared directory (read/write).
On host, edit $HOME/message.txt with `vim`, and add a line with the contents "Hello, World!". Save the file (`:w`), but do NOT close `vim`
On guest:
$ cd /Volumes/VMware\ Shared\ Folders/jon
$ cat message.txt
Hello, World!
$
So it appears to work.
On host, append a new line (e.g. "Goodbye, world!") and save again (`:w`).
On guest:
$ cat message.txt
Hello, World!
$
Uh, where'd the new contents go?
On guest:
$ ls -l message2.txt
So it has the right file size, but it doesn't have the correct contents.
Oddly, using `echo` instead of `vim` to reproduce things results in expected behavior, but once the Shared Folders have gotten into this "inconsistent" state I can't fix things. `touch`ing the file in the host results in no changes in the guest. Removing the file in the host _occasionally_ results in the guest still seeing the file.
I've read elsewhere that there may be some caching in the Shared Folders feature, but even after waiting more than 5 seconds between the write in the host and the read in the guest, I get stale data.
This renders shared folders largely useless to me; using AFP to connect to the host from the guest is far more workable (if Lion would actually let me enable file sharing (!); for now I have to `scp` files between the host and the guest to get updated versions).