For a scriptable control of Virtual Box machines we can make use of the VBoxManage commands:

• List running machines (returns name and UUID):

  VBoxManage list runningvms
  

• Stop running VMs by "hibernating" them (reommended to avoid data loss)

  VBoxManage controlvm <name|uuid> savestate
  

• Poweroff running VMs (not recommended because we may lose data in the guest)

  VBoxManage controlvm <name|uuid> poweroff
  

• Use ACPI in an ACPI-aware guest OS (preferable to poweroff for graceful shutdown of guests)

  VBoxManage controlvm <name|uuid> acpipowerbutton
  

Also see: How to safely shutdown Guest OS in VirtualBox using command line

Update from OP

Based on this selected correct answer below, I've added this bash script "$HOME/bin/stop-vagrant.sh". So now I have something that can safely begin a stop of all vagrant VMs that I might have turned on yet forgotten about in a session.

vboxmanage list runningvms | sed -r 's/.*\{(.*)\}/\1/' | xargs -L1 -I {} VBoxManage controlvm {} savestate

Command Explained:

vboxmanage list runningvms | -- gets a list of all running vms under VirtualBox

sed -r 's/.*\{(.*)\}/\1/' | -- strips the string down to id number

xargs -L1 -I {} VBoxManage controlvm {} savestate -- runs the save state command on each box that's open.

On xargs

• -L1 - take one line at a time
• -I {} - uses {} as a place holder for the next command

The other answer is great for handling Virtualbox, but Vagrant features its own mechanisms for handling Virtual Machines, and as was mentioned in one of the comments, it supports more than just VirtualBox, just VMWare at the moment, but who knows later!

This seems to work for me:

vagrant global-status | awk '/running/{print $1}' | xargs -r -d '\n' -n 1 -- vagrant suspend

Note:

This works with Vagrant versions after 1.6, for older versions, you should probably upgrade, but if you can't, one of the other options which focuses on Virtualbox may be better.

My mechanism for this:

vagrant global-status | grep virtualbox | cut -c 1-9 | while read line; do echo $line; vagrant halt $line; done;

• global-status lists all boxes
• filter that for lines containing virtualbox (Filters out the help text, will break if you're using some other provider)
• Filter that to display only the first 9 characters (the global unique ID)
• While we can still read a line from that input, read it as the variable $line then:
  • Print out that $line
  • run vagrant halt $line halting the vagrant for that global unique ID

This is better than the Virtualbox method above, because it'll run any vagrant-configured shutdown mechanisms too.

Combining some of the other answers, this will close down all running virtualbox vagrant boxes:

vagrant global-status | awk '/virtualbox running/{ print $1 }' | xargs vagrant halt

In case other people get to this question: For those using VirtualBox, it already can take care of this, only involves editing a file:

# Contents of /etc/default/virtualbox
# ...
# ...
# SHUTDOWN_USERS="foo bar"  
#   check for running VMs of user 'foo' and user 'bar'
#   'all' checks for all active users
# SHUTDOWN=poweroff
# SHUTDOWN=acpibutton
# SHUTDOWN=savestate
#   select one of these shutdown methods for running VMs
#   acpibutton and savestate causes the init script to wait
#   30 seconds for the VMs to shutdown

## My original values
# SHUTDOWN_USERS=""
# SHUTDOWN=poweroff

## My current values
SHUTDOWN_USERS="all"
SHUTDOWN=savestate

The upside is that is not necessary to edit/create any logout or init.d stript to run the commands posted in the other answers. The downside is this solution is specific to VirtualBox.

Tested on Ubuntu 14.10 with VirtualBox 4.3.18.

All credit goes to this post.

I just use vagrant halt. If you run it without a further argument, it stops all the machines defined in the Vagrantfile.

If you're writing scripts to parse Vagrant commands, it's advised to parse machine-friendly output (--machine-readable) which is more consistent.

The format is:

timestamp,target,type,data...

so you can import it as CSV file, since it's comma-separated.

With shell, it's probably more difficult to parse, for example:

for id in $(vagrant global-status --machine-readable | cut -d, -f5 | grep -B3 running | egrep -o "[0-9a-f]{7}"); do
    vagrant suspend $id;
done

See: Vagrant - Machine readable output

However I find it easier to parse the standard output, e.g.

while read id name provider state path; do
  [ "$state" = "running" ] && vagrant suspend $id;
done < <(vagrant global-status)

Btw. Theoretically vagrant command should accept a regular expression for the list of VMs to suspend as per this GH post, for example:

vagrant suspend '*'

but it doesn't work and there is a bug #7221 which is pending in order to fix it.

Related GitHub tickets:

• GH #7220: Provide extra options for filtering the list for vagrant global-status.
• GH: #7221: Implement --all for suspend or vagrant suspend-all.

This may or may not work for you ;-) Works for me

vagrant_halt_all.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash
if [ -z "$1" ]
then
  OPTS=""
else
  # force close if any arg passed
  OPTS="-f"
fi

for i in $(vagrant global-status | grep running | awk '{print $1}'); do 
  DIR=$(vagrant global-status | grep running | awk '{print $5}')
  cd "$DIR";
  OUT=$(vagrant halt);
  echo "attempted to halt $i: $OUT"
done

Here is a compilation of working one-liners as of September 2020. Thanks to all the previous authors for inspiration.

Halt all vagrant boxes

Version 1 (shorter)

vagrant global-status | awk '/virtualbox running/{ print $1 }' | xargs vagrant halt

Version 2 (more robust)

macOS/BSD compatible:

vagrant global-status --machine-readable | cut -d, -f5 | grep -B3 running | egrep -o '[0-9a-f]{7}' | xargs -n 1 -- vagrant halt

GNU compaible:

vagrant global-status --machine-readable | cut -d, -f5 | grep -B3 running | egrep -o '[0-9a-f]{7}' | xargs -r -d '\n' -n 1 -- vagrant halt

Alias

You can add this to an alias for quick execution. Add this code to ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc or your shell's equivalent.

macOS/BSD example:

alias vagrantHaltAll="vagrant global-status --machine-readable | cut -d, -f5 | grep -B3 running | egrep -o '[0-9a-f]{7}' | xargs -n 1 -- vagrant halt"

# Usage:
vagrantHaltAll

Suspend all vagrant boxes

Or if you want to suspend any running machines, the syntax is easy:

vagrant suspend --all

I recommend using halt for web servers; it saves disk space and may be faster.

Because vagrant halt requires VM metadata (you run it in the directory with the file Vagrantfile & the directory .vagrant) it cannot be used easily to halt all VMs.

In some cases it is enough to halt all VBoxes:

myvbox-halt-all() {
  VBoxManage list runningvms |& tr -d '\r' | while read name uuid; do
    VBoxManage controlvm "$uuid" acpipowerbutton
  done
}