On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 08:54:17PM +0100, Olaf Hering wrote:

Silly bash scripts have stuff like below to get things done, but equally silly guestfish scripts fail to add the required newline. Why is that?

echo "$dev1 $mnt1 $fs $opts 1 2" >> /etc/fstab echo "$dev2 $mnt2 $fs $opts 1 2" >> /etc/fstab

write-append /etc/fstab "$dev1 $mnt1 $fs $opts 1 2" : \ write-append /etc/fstab "$dev2 $mnt2 $fs $opts 1 2" : \

Even adding variants of \n does not help.

Simple testcase:

write /etc/fstab "#\n" : \ write-append /etc/fstab '#1\n' : \ write-append /etc/fstab '#2\\n' : \ cat /etc/fstab : \ quit

... libguestfs: trace: cat = "#\n#1\n#2\\n" #\n#1\n#2\\n libguestfs: trace: shutdown ...

I guess using "sh" will be my workaround.

Yup, the parser in guestfish is ... informally specified. In this case you can use guestfish commands instead of the command line, ie: guestfish -N fs -m /dev/sda1 <<EOF write-append /fstab "123\n" write-append /fstab "456\n" write-append /fstab "789\n" cat /fstab EOF Output: 123 456 789 Pino Toscano is looking at rewriting the parser to use a formally specified language implemented using bison. It's not happened yet however. Have you considered using a real programming language, like Perl + Sys::Guestfs, Python + guestfs etc.? Whenever I bump into the limits of guestfish, I usually turn to Perl. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines. Boot with a live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into KVM guests. http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v