Fork into the background and listen for remote commands. See section
L</REMOTE CONTROL GUESTFISH OVER A SOCKET> below.
+=item B<--live>
+
+Connect to a live virtual machine.
+(Experimental, see L<guestfs(3)/ATTACHING TO RUNNING DAEMONS>).
+
=item B<-m dev[:mountpoint]>
=item B<--mount dev[:mountpoint]>
=item B<--ro>
-This changes the I<-a> and I<-m> options so that disks are added and
-mounts are done read-only (see L<guestfs(3)/guestfs_mount_ro>).
+This changes the I<-a>, I<-d> and I<-m> options so that disks are
+added and mounts are done read-only.
The option must always be used if the disk image or virtual machine
might be running, and is generally recommended in cases where you
don't need write access to the disk.
Note that prepared disk images created with I<-N> are not affected by
-the I<--ro> option.
+this option. Also commands like C<add> are not affected - you have to
+specify the C<readonly:true> option explicitly if you need it.
See also L</OPENING DISKS FOR READ AND WRITE> below.
This matters: If you accidentally open a live VM disk image writable
then you will cause irreversible disk corruption.
-By libguestfs 1.8 we intend to change the default the other way. Disk
+By libguestfs 1.10 we intend to change the default the other way. Disk
images will be opened read-only. You will have to either specify
I<guestfish --rw> or change a configuration file in order to get write
access for disk images specified by those other command line options.
To change the local directory, use the C<lcd> command. C<!cd> will
have no effect, due to the way that subprocesses work in Unix.
+=head2 LOCAL COMMANDS WITH INLINE EXECUTION
+
+If a line starts with I<E<lt>!> then the shell command is executed (as
+for I<!>), but subsequently any output (stdout) of the shell command
+is parsed and executed as guestfish commands.
+
+Thus you can use shell script to construct arbitrary guestfish
+commands which are then parsed by guestfish.
+
+For example it is tedious to create a sequence of files
+(eg. C</foo.1> through C</foo.100>) using guestfish commands
+alone. However this is simple if we use a shell script to
+create the guestfish commands for us:
+
+ <! for n in `seq 1 100`; do echo write /foo.$n $n; done
+
+or with names like C</foo.001>:
+
+ <! for n in `seq 1 100`; do printf "write /foo.%03d %d\n" $n $n; done
+
+When using guestfish interactively it can be helpful to just run the
+shell script first (ie. remove the initial C<E<lt>> character so it is
+just an ordinary I<!> local command), see what guestfish commands it
+would run, and when you are happy with those prepend the C<E<lt>>
+character to run the guestfish commands for real.
+
=head1 PIPES
Use C<command E<lt>spaceE<gt> | command> to pipe the output of the
=item TMPDIR
-Location of temporary directory, defaults to C</tmp>.
+Location of temporary directory, defaults to C</tmp> except for the
+cached supermin appliance which defaults to C</var/tmp>.
If libguestfs was compiled to use the supermin appliance then the
real appliance is cached in this directory, shared between all
handles belonging to the same EUID. You can use C<$TMPDIR> to
-configure another directory to use in case C</tmp> is not large
+configure another directory to use in case C</var/tmp> is not large
enough.
=back
L<guestfs(3)>,
L<http://libguestfs.org/>,
L<virt-cat(1)>,
+L<virt-copy-in(1)>,
+L<virt-copy-out(1)>,
L<virt-df(1)>,
L<virt-edit(1)>,
L<virt-filesystems(1)>,
L<virt-rescue(1)>,
L<virt-resize(1)>,
L<virt-tar(1)>,
+L<virt-tar-in(1)>,
+L<virt-tar-out(1)>,
L<virt-win-reg(1)>,
L<hexedit(1)>.
git.annexia.org / libguestfs.git / blobdiff