Re: [Qemu-discuss] read monitor commands from a file

[Mike Lovell]

On 12/13/2012 08:47 PM, Shijesta Victor wrote:
> Is it possible to read monitor commands off a file? I couldn't get 
> this working.
>
> What I need is this:
> I would have a list of commands in a file, and I want it as if these 
> commands were typed at the monitor prompt one after another.

it might be possible to hack something together when running the monitor 
on a socket. then you can just connect to the socket, write the commands 
you want, and read the responses. i believe this is how libvirt 
originally controlled a qemu process.

to get the monitor to use a local unix socket, add '-monitor 
unix:/path/to/sock,server,nowait' to the command line. then you can use 
something like `nc -U /path/to/sock < /path/to/command.txt` to connect 
to the socket and give the commands to the monitor. you could also use 
tcp or udp sockets but you'll probably want to limit it to listening on 
localhost.

if you are going to do very many things with the monitor, you might want 
to look at the qmp interfaces. qmp (qemu management protocol) is a way 
to talk to the monitor that is a bit nicer for programmatic interaction. 
it uses json and is documented in the QMP/ directory of the qemu source. 
there is also some example python in that directory for talking to the 
monitor.

mike