Tip: Uploading and downloading

Talked to someone today who was confused by how to get files in and out of a virtual machine disk image. , , , , and offer several ways to do this, and in this article I’m going to summarize all these different ways.

First of all, answer these questions:

1. Upload (ie. from your host into the disk image) or
   download (disk image down to host)?
2. Single file or lots of files?
3. Have you got / do you want a tarball, or a directory containing the individual files?
4. Do you want to download the files or just get a list of files?

I should note as usual that uploading or modifying a guest is only safe if the guest is shut off. If you try to modify a live guest you’ll get disk corruption, so watch out.

Downloading a single file

Easiest way is with virt-cat:

virt-cat GuestName /path/to/file > file

An alternative is to use :

guestfish -i --ro -d GuestName \
    download /path/to/file ./localfile

Uploading a single file

If the file exists and it’s a text file that you want to edit, the easiest way is to use virt-edit:

virt-edit GuestName /path/to/file

To upload a single file in general, use :

guestfish -i -d GuestName \
    upload ./localfile /path/to/file

Downloading multiple files

Easiest way is probably to use the command:

guestfish -i --ro -d GuestName \
    copy-out /directory ./localdir

Uploading multiple files

Use command:

guestfish -i -d GuestName <

	If you want to quickly upload lots of files, the fastest method is to
 prepare an ISO (mkisofs) or squashfs containing the files and attach it
 as an extra disk.  You can then copy files quickly to where you need 
them, eg:

guestfish -i -d GuestName -a my.iso <

	Downloading or uploading a tarball


	There is a high level tool called  which automates this.  You can also do it semi-manually using the guestfish commands , , ,  (and more, see the guestfish documentation).


	Listing files


	Finally to list out files, use the high level  tool, or the low level guestfish commands  (flat list of a single directory) or  (recursive listing of subdirectories).