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!