archivefs

Archivefs is a read-only FUSE filesystem for mounting compressed archives, inspired by archivemount.

Features

• Read-only mount any archive file supported by libarchive to a directory
• Several orders of magnitude faster decompression compared to archivemount

Archive formats

Archivefs supports all the formats supported by libarchive, including, but not limited to:

• tar (compressed with gzip, bzip2, xz, zstd)
• cpio
• ISO9660 (including Joliet and Rockridge extensions)
• zip
• 7-Zip

Note that libarchive has known bugs when reading rar archives.

System requirements

For running

• Linux Kernel 3.15 or later (While FUSE works on other operating systems, the polyfuse crate used by archivefs only supports Linux at the moment)
• The fusermount command (usually provided by the fuse or fuse2 package)
• libarchive

For compiling

• Rust 1.31 or greater
• Development files for libarchive (usually provided by the libarchive-dev or libarchive-devel package)

For building the man page

• Python 3.5 or greater
• AsciiDoc

Installation

# This will install only the archivefs executable in $HOME/.cargo/bin, without any
# man page. Also, make sure that the $HOME/.cargo/bin directory is in your PATH
cargo install archivefs

# Alternatively, you can build from source using the command
cargo build --release
# and then copy the file target/release/archivefs somewhere in your PATH

# To build the man page:
a2x -f manpage doc/archivefs.1.adoc
# and then copy the file doc/archivefs.1 in a man path (like $HOME/.local/share/man/man1 )

Usage

archivefs [OPTIONS] ARCHIVEPATH MOUNTPOINT

Example session

Consider the gzipped tar archive files.tgz containing files file1 and file2, and an empty directory mnt.

$ ls
files.tgz    mnt/

# Mount the archive file
$ archivefs files.tgz mnt

$ ls mnt
file1    file2

# Perform desired read operations on the archive via mnt/
# For example, to extract a file simply copy it
$ cp mnt/file1 ~/

# Unmount the archive when done
$ umount mnt

Write support

Contrary to archivemount, which sort-of supports writing to an archive by recreating it, archivefs only supports reading from archives.

Hard link support

Note that if an archive contains hard links, they will be treated as separate files by archivefs.