Having been bitten one more time by the use of -d to pass the hypervisor URI instead of -c (confusion coming from CVS using -d to specify the root), I suggest to drop atoi and use the function with checking and error out with proper explanation instead of silently failing ! paphio:~/libvirt -> /usr/bin/virsh -d qemu+ssh://test2/system list Id Name State ---------------------------------- paphio:~/libvirt -> tools/virsh -d qemu+ssh://test2/system list error: option -d take a numeric argument paphio:~/libvirt -> tools/virsh -d 5 list command: "list " Id Name State ---------------------------------- paphio:~/libvirt -> Daniel -- Daniel Veillard | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit http://xmlsoft.org/ daniel@veillard.com | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/ http://veillard.com/ | virtualization library http://libvirt.org/