New (Year’s) libguestfs tools: virt-copy-in, virt-copy-out, virt-tar-in, virt-tar-out

One aim with libguestfs development is to make easy and common file operations easy. Although you can already upload and download files into virtual machines using guestfish commands, is there a way to make this common operation easier to discover?

One way is to add more virt commands, which I’ve found that users have least difficulty discovering because they are on the website, autocompleted when you hit virt-[tab], and listed as separated manual pages.

So today I added four more commands for uploading and downloading: virt-copy-in, virt-copy-out, virt-tar-in, virt-tar-out.

The way you use them is very simple:

$ mkdir homes
$ virt-copy-out -d Fedora14 /home homes/

$ virt-tar-out -d Fedora14 /home - | \
    gzip --best > homes.tar.gz

These commands are just small shell script wrappers around guestfish, but I hope they make common things a little bit easier.

You can get these new commands from Fedora Rawhide, or as binaries for Debian or Ubuntu.