Last week I noticed a message on the emerging technologies management tools mailing list announcing a release of a project called libguestfs developed by Richard M. Jones of Redhat. Before this announcement, I had never heard of this project which aroused my curiosity so I decided to follow the included link and found it to be interesting enough to write about it. This project was completely off my radar. The first entry in the git repository was March 2009 so it's a very recent project. It's described as a library for accessing and modifying disk images which I'm sure will find many uses.

The library has bindings for python, perl, ocaml, ruby and java. It can access any type of guest filesystem such as ext2/3/4, FAT, LVM etc and disk partition schemes such as qcow2, vmdk among others. The site provides links to examples in each of the available bindings.

The project website can be found at the following link.

http://libguestfs.org/

Example Usage Page

http://libguestfs.org/recipes.html