Hive files are the undocumented binary files that Windows uses to store the Windows Registry on disk. Hivex is a library that can read and write to these files. hivexsh is a shell you can use to interactively navigate a hive binary file. hivexregedit lets you export and merge to the textual regedit format. hivexml can be used to convert a hive file to a more useful XML format. In order to get access to the hive files themselves, you can copy them from a Windows machine. They are usually found in %systemroot%\system32\config. For virtual machines we recommend using libguestfs or guestfish to copy out these files. libguestfs also provides a useful high-level tool called virt-win-reg which can be used to query specific registry keys in an existing Windows VM. For OCaml bindings, see ocaml-hivex-devel. For Perl bindings, see perl-hivex. For Python 3 bindings, see python3-hivex. For Ruby bindings, see ruby-hivex.