What is it ---------- Archivemount is a piece of glue code between libarchive (http://people.freebsd.org/~kientzle/libarchive/) and FUSE (http://fuse.sourceforge.net). It can be used to mount a (possibly compressed) archive (as in .tar.gz or .tar.bz2) and use it like an ordinary filesystem. Requirements ------------ You will need autoconf, libarchive-dev and libfuse-dev for building archivemont, as well as GNU make and gcc of course. Installation ------------ From version 0.6.0 on archivemount uses autoconf, so just do the normal autoreconf -i ./configure && make && sudo make install to build archivemount and install it to /usr/local. For building it, libfuse is needed in version 2.6 or higher, including its headerfiles of course (on most distributions those can be found in a package named something like libfuse-dev or so). Usage ----- archivemount <options> <archive> <mountpoint> Options are the normal fuse mount options, nothing special supported yet. Write support ------------- Writing to an archive with libarchive is unfortunately not possible. In order to provide write support thus the whole archive has to be recreated; this requires two things: space and time. To optimize at least the timely behaviour, archives are recreated only once: at the time of unmount. If there are any problems creating the new archive - bad luck, the changes are lost. Some checks are run when mounting the archive to determine if it can be mounted writeable, but there is no guarantee. Also note that unmounting a fuse filesystem is NOT necessarily completed when the unmount command returns. Although unmounting takes a long time already, fuse backgrounds the process and lets the unmount command return early. You can check on the real state of unmounting by checking the process list for archivemount. THERE IS ALSO NO GUARANTEE THAT DATA IS WRITTEN CORRECTLY. DO NOT TRUST THIS SOFTWARE! A backup is made of the original archive (with .orig appended to the name), but please understand that I, the author of archivemount, do not guarantee anything at all about the state of your data and I am not responsible if you lose vital information by using this software. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! Archive formats --------------- A note about archive and compression formats: libarchive supports a lot more formats for reading than it does for writing. Archivemount tries to do a sensible conversion here when writing the changed archive because I think most people do not care a lot about the exact version of tar used inside the .tgz file as long as their favourite archive tool can still cope with the file.