If you are used to using Qemu for doing some experiments with different distro’s then you would also understand the problem of having to do ftp/ssh to copy the files from virtual machine to local machine. Also you have to run the machine to do that. How would you like to have a application that can help you copy the files to and from the  image without having to run the VM. That’s exactly what the guestfish does. How to do it, quick demo here:

sudo yum install guestfish

Now once installed you can run guestfish by typing guestfish. Extensive help is available with help command so I am just giving pointers here to get you started:

First add the drive image with

add-drive

Start a qemu sub-process inside guestfish

launch

Now mount the drive using

mount /dev/sda1 /

you can list the devices using

list-devices

Now you can use upload, download, ls, mkdir, cat et. al. See help for more details.