16.2. Terminology

libguestfs (Guest file system library) - the underlying C library that provides the basic functionality for opening disk images, reading and writing files and so on. You can write C programs directly to this API, but it is quite low level.

guestfish (Guest file system interactive shell) is an interactive shell that you can use from the command line or from shell scripts. It exposes all of the functionality of the libguestfs API.

Various virt tools are built on top of libguestfs, and these provide a way to perform specific single tasks from the command line. Tools include virt-df, virt-rescue, virt-resize and virt-edit.

hivex and Augeas are libraries for editing the Windows Registry and Linux configuration files respectively. Although these are separate from libguestfs, much of the value of libguestfs comes from the combination of these tools.

guestmount is an interface between libguestfs and FUSE. It is primarily used to mount file systems from disk images on your host physical machine. This functionality is not necessary, but can be useful.