Global options

Global options and nvme-cli.conf

Every nvme command accepts the global options. Since nvme-cli 3.0, /etc/nvme/nvme-cli.conf can set defaults for them.

Global options

Option	Meaning
-o, --output-format=<fmt>	Output format: normal, json, binary or tabular. Not every command supports every format. --help lists the formats of a command.
--output-format-version=<n>	Version of the JSON output: 1 or 2. The default is 2.
-v, --verbose	Print more details. Give it more than once for even more details.
--quiet	Print no informational messages. Errors are still printed.
--timeout=<ms>	Timeout of the command in milliseconds. infinite waits without a limit.
--dry-run	Show what the command would do, but do not do it.
--no-retries	Do not retry after a transient error.
--no-ioctl-probing	Do not probe for the 64-bit ioctls.
--set-options=<key=value>,...	Set libnvme options: force-4k, mi-probe-enabled, test-base-dir and test-sysfs-dir.

Since nvme-cli 3.2, global options mean the same for every command, and every command accepts them. Some commands had their own --human-readable (-H) or --verbose (-V). Use -v instead. -H and --human-readable still work, with a deprecation warning. See Breaking changes.

--dry-run

--dry-run skips the NVMe commands. Since nvme-cli 3.2, it also skips resets, namespace rescans, the sed operations that change the drive, and fabrics connects and disconnects. Combine it with -vv to see what nvme connect would send to the kernel:

# nvme connect --dry-run -vv --transport=tcp --traddr=192.168.30.30 \
    --nqn=nqn.2024-01.com.example:storage.vol1
...
connect ctrl, 'nqn=nqn.2024-01.com.example:storage.vol1,transport=tcp,traddr=192.168.30.30,trsvcid=4420,hostnqn=...,hostid=...,ctrl_loss_tmo=600'
dry-run: connect skipped

nvme-cli.conf

/etc/nvme/nvme-cli.conf sets defaults for the global options for all users. An option on the command line always wins over the file:

# /etc/nvme/nvme-cli.conf
[Global]
no-ioctl-probing = true
output-format = json
timeout = 5000

• The keys have the names of the long options, without --: verbose, quiet, output-format, timeout, dry-run, no-retries, no-ioctl-probing, output-format-version and set-options.
• verbose takes the level. verbose = 2 is the same as -vv.
• Booleans accept 1, yes, true, on and 0, no, false, off.
• Only the [Global] section is used.
• A missing file changes nothing. A file that cannot be read is an error.
• There is no drop-in directory, and no option to select another file.

nvme warns about an unknown key or a bad value and ignores it. The rest of the file still applies:

/etc/nvme/nvme-cli.conf:4: unknown key "bogus", ignoring
/etc/nvme/nvme-cli.conf:2: invalid value "10s" for "timeout", ignoring

Since nvme-cli 3.2, numbers are parsed strictly, also in this file. For example, timeout = 10s is invalid. Before 3.2, it set a timeout of 10 milliseconds.

The file must be readable by all users. With privilege separation, nvme reads it after it drops root. Do not put secrets into this file.

Environment

Variable	Meaning
NO_COLOR	Set to a non-empty value to turn colors off (since 3.2).
NVME_SANDBOX	0 turns the decoder sandbox off, 1 turns it on. See Privilege Separation.
NVME_PRIVSEP_UID, NVME_PRIVSEP_GID	The user and group for privilege separation, when sudo is not used.

See also

• Using nvme-cli in scripts
• nvme(1), nvme-cli.conf(5)