Cool User File Systems: ArchiveMount

“Have you ever wanted to look inside a tar.gz file but without
expanding it? Have you ever wanted to just dump files in a .tar.gz
file without having to organize it and periodically tar and gzip
this data? This article presents another REALLY useful user-space
file system, archivemount. It allows you to mount archives such as
.tar.gz files as a file system and interact with it using normal
file/directory tools.

“I’m not sure about you but when I examine a new tool or package
that I’m building from source I usually like to read the
documentation first and perhaps examine the makefile or examine the
output of “configure –help”. But I really want to do this
without gunzip-ing and untarring the archive.

“I also have the opposite problem in that I sometimes just want
to grab various files and collect them into a .tar.gz archive
without having to organize a complete tree and then tar it and gzip
it. Ideally I would just have a directory where I could copy data
and it would automatically create the archive for me. You can call
me lazy of you like but I started computing when storage space was
at a premium so I tend to be conservative with my disk space. At
the same time, however, I tend to be a pack rat with code, which
has saved my bacon several times. So I look for something that
allows me to efficiently archive my data”

Complete
Story