Enabling Shared Folders In VMWare Player Manually

For some strange reason, even after installing VMWare Tools on the Windows guest VM, I couldn’t set up the Shared Folders feature on my Linux host. The reason seems stupid: it just won’t let me add new shared folders to the empty list. Eventually I edited the VM’s vmx file and added the shared folders manually. Here’s how:
First, you add the following line that says how many shared folders you have:

sharedFolder.maxNum = “2”

Next, for each shared folder, starting with 0 (zero) you add a few lines describing it. Here’s how to add two different shared folders:

sharedFolder0.present = “TRUE”
sharedFolder0.enabled = “TRUE”
sharedFolder0.readAccess = “TRUE”
sharedFolder0.writeAccess = “FALSE”
sharedFolder0.hostPath = “/home/gnobal/”
sharedFolder0.guestName = “gnobal”
sharedFolder0.expiration = “never”

sharedFolder1.present = “TRUE”
sharedFolder1.enabled = “TRUE”
sharedFolder1.readAccess = “TRUE”
sharedFolder1.writeAccess = “FALSE”
sharedFolder1.hostPath = “/tmp”
sharedFolder1.guestName = “tmp”
sharedFolder1.expiration = “never”

The properties of each shared folder are self-descriptive, so I won’t go over each one.