16.10.3. Using virt-win-reg
To read out Registry keys, specify the name of the guest virtual machine (or its disk image) and the name of the Registry key. You must use single quotes to surround the name of the desired key:
# virt-win-reg WindowsGuest \
'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall' \
| less
The output is in the standard text-based format used by
.REG files on Windows.
Note
Hex-quoting is used for strings because the format does not properly define a portable encoding method for strings. This is the only way to ensure fidelity when transporting
.REG files from one machine to another.
You can make hex-quoted strings printable by piping the output of
virt-win-reg through this simple Perl script:
perl -MEncode -pe's?hex\((\d+)\):(\S+)?$t=$1;$_=$2;s,\,,,g;"str($t):\"".decode(utf16le=>pack("H*",$_))."\""?eg'
To merge changes into the Windows Registry of an offline guest virtual machine, you must first prepare a
.REG file. There is a great deal of documentation about doing this available here. When you have prepared a .REG file, enter the following:
# virt-win-reg --merge WindowsGuest input.reg
This will update the registry in the guest virtual machine.
