On 10/29/2014 10:44 AM, Allen Qiu wrote: You are running virsh in interactive mode. Right now, dumpxml only outputs to stdout, and '>' only works as a redirection for shell mode. So, instead of: $ virsh virsh # dumpxml ... you want to do: $ virsh dumpxml ... > file But yes, it would be nice to write a patch to virsh to add an optional --output=file for each of the dumpxml family of functions, to write there instead of stdout, so that you can get interactive virsh to output xml to a file. Would you like to try your hand at the patch? -- Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org