16.4.2. Modifying Files with guestfish

To modify files, create directories or make other changes to a guest virtual machine, first heed the warning at the beginning of this section: your guest virtual machine must be shut down. Editing or changing a running disk with guestfish will result in disk corruption. This section gives an example of editing the /boot/grub/grub.conf file. When you are sure the guest virtual machine is shut down you can omit the --ro option in order to get write access via a command such as:

guestfish -d RHEL3 -i

Welcome to guestfish, the libguestfs filesystem interactive shell for
 editing virtual machine filesystems.

 Type: 'help' for help on commands
       'man' to read the manual
       'quit' to quit the shell

 Operating system: Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 3 (Taroon Update 9)
 /dev/vda2 mounted on /
 /dev/vda1 mounted on /boot

><fs> edit /boot/grub/grub.conf

Commands to edit files include edit, vi and emacs. Many commands also exist for creating files and directories, such as write, mkdir, upload and tar-in.