qemu -readconfig/-writeconfig cannot handle quotes in values $ qemu-system-x86_64 -drive file=/tmp/foo\" -writeconfig - # qemu config file [drive] file = "/tmp/foo"" For bonus points, try to construct a value qemu config file that contains a quoted value. It's pretty clear (from looking at the code also) that this is not possible. Also: - maximum value length is hard-coded in the parser at 1023 characters (for no apparent reason) - the format is undocumented - don't use sscanf for parsing! This is an automated cleanup. This bug report has been moved to QEMU's new bug tracker on gitlab.com and thus gets marked as 'expired' now. Please continue with the discussion here: https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/142