Sometimes when setting up a new Linux VM the shared folder functionality HGFS (Host-Guest Filesystem) does not work after installing the package “open-vm-tools-desktop”. This happened to me in Fedora 29 recently.

To fix the issue you can add a systemd service which will automount all available shares. Add this script to “/etc/systemd/system/vmhgfs.service”:

[Unit]
After=network.target
Description=VMWare HGFS automounting

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/vmhgfs-fuse -o allow_other,auto_unmount .host:/ /mnt/hgfs

[Install]
WantedBy=multi.user.target

Now enable and start the newly made systemd service:

systemctl enable vmhgfs.service
systemctl start vmhgfs.service