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NAME

vmmon — access the Qemu monitor shell

SYNOPSIS

vmcp	[-hn] [path]

DESCRIPTION

Access the Qemu monitor shell of a virtual machine. This shell is provided by Qemu to interactively control every aspect of the hypervisor. path may be of various types:

• A virtual machine home directory.
• A regular file inside a virtual machine home directory.
• A Qemu monitor socket file.

If no path is provided, the current working directory is assumed.

OPTIONS

The options are as follows:

-h

Show usage information summary then exit.

-n

Don’t use rlwrap(1), even if it is available on the host, access the raw Qemu Monitor prompt instead.

This option has no effect if rlwrap(1) is not available on the host.

Use this option if you encounter any issue when using rlwrap(1).

ENVIRONMENT

XDG_CONFIG_HOME

Location of user’s configuration files, by default ~/.config.

FILES

/usr/local/lib/vmtools

Libraries shared by the vmtools project utilities.

/usr/local/share/vmtools/vmtools.conf

Virtual machine default settings, see vmtools.conf(5).

Moreover, the content of /usr/local/share/vmtools can be overridden in the following locations (in the order of precedence):

~/.config/vmtools

User overrides (if cfg_include_userhome is set to “yes”).

/etc/vmtools

System-wide overrides.

EXIT STATUS

The vmmon utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

EXAMPLES

Example 1:

Access the Qemu monitor shell of the current virtual machine:

cd ~/path/to/my_vm 
vmmon

Example 2:

Access the Qemu monitor shell of another virtual machine:

vmmon ~/path/to/my_other_vm

Example 3:

Send a single command (here sendkey Ctrl-Alt-Del) to a Qemu hypervisor:

echo 'sendkey Ctrl-Alt-Del' | vmmon ~/path/to/my_vm

SEE ALSO

vminfo(1), vmps(1), vmtools(7)

CAVEATS

vmmon requires socat(1) to be available on the host system. If, in addition, rlwrap(1) is also available it will be used to provide a more comfortable prompt based on the readline(3) library.

REPORTING BUGS

Please send bug reports to the vmtools issues page.