Re: Suggestion for new filesystem : tar files ?

Miklos Szeredi (Miklos.Szeredi@eth.ericsson.se)
Fri, 11 Sep 1998 10:25:40 +0200

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Maybe in reply to: Scott Gordon: "Suggestion for new filesystem : tar files ?"

> I'm wondering if anyone has ever tried to implement tar files as a filesystem
> in Linux ?
>
> It sounds to me like it would be simple (at least for the read-only case), and
> could be useful, eg. easily examining and extracting files from distributions
> of software, or recovering backups, without having to use special commands.
>
> Probably using compressed tar files ( *.tar.gz ) would be tricky and slow
> though I suspect, since decoding each byte depends on the whole earlier
> contents of the file (as I understand it).

I'm currently working on a user-space solution to this problem. You can
find the current version at:
http://www.inf.bme.hu/~mszeredi/avfs/

It's almost as transparent, as if it was a kernel filesystem, and no
mounting is necessary. It currently supports tar, gz, bz2 and zip
files listing and extraction (i.e. read-only), and rar-files only
listing.

There are some minor problems with solving this totally in user-space,
so in the future there should be some kernel support for it as
well. It's not yet clear how that would be done.

Miklos Szeredi

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Next message: Thomas Kunert: "Re: NFS does not work"
Previous message: David Howells: "Re: Module Ideas: Persistence, PnP, and more..."
Maybe in reply to: Scott Gordon: "Suggestion for new filesystem : tar files ?"