Awesome

title: fuse-archive section: 1 header: User Manual footer: fuse-archive 1.4 date: December 2024

NAME

fuse-archive - Mount an archive or compressed file as a FUSE file system.

SYNOPSIS

fuse-archive [options] archive-file [mount-point]

DESCRIPTION

fuse-archive is a program that serves an archive or compressed file (e.g. foo.tar, foo.tar.gz, foo.xz or foo.zip) as a read-only FUSE file system.

It is similar to mount-zip and fuse-zip but speaks a larger range of archive or compressed file formats.

It is similar to archivemount but can be much faster (see the Performance section below) although it can only mount read-only, not read-write.

OPTIONS

--help -h : Print help

--version : Print version

--quiet -q : Print fewer log messages

--verbose -v : Print more log messages

--redact : Redact file names from log messages

-o force : Continue despite errors

-o nocache : No caching of uncompressed data

-o nospecials : Hide special files (FIFOs, sockets, devices)

-o nosymlinks : Hide symbolic links

-o nohardlinks : No files with multiple hardlinks

-o dmask=M : Directory permission mask in octal (default 0022)

-o fmask=M : File permission mask in octal (default 0022)

-o uid=N : Set the file owner of all the items in the mounted archive (default is current user)

-o gid=N : Set file group of all the items in the mounted archive (default is current group)

-o default_permissions : Use the file owner (UID), group (GID) and permissions stored with each item in the archive.

-f : Foreground mode

-d : Foreground mode with debug output

CACHING

By default, fuse-archive decompresses and caches the whole archive before serving its contents. This ensures that the served files can be accessed in any order without any performance issue.

Decompressed data is cached in an anonymous file created in the tmp directory ($TMPDIR or /tmp by default). This cache can use a significant amount of disk space, but it is automatically deleted when the archive is unmounted.

If there is not enough temporary space to cache the whole archive, fuse-archive can be run with the -o nocache option. However, this can cause fuse-archive to be much slower at serving files.

PERFORMANCE

Create a single .tar.gz file that is 256 MiB decompressed and 255 KiB compressed (the file just contains repeated 0x00 NUL bytes):

$ truncate --size=256M zeroes
$ tar cfz zeroes-256mib.tar.gz zeroes

Here are fuse-archive's timings:

$ time fuse-archive zeroes-256mib.tar.gz mnt
real    0m0.443s

$ dd if=mnt/zeroes of=/dev/null status=progress
268435456 bytes (268 MB, 256 MiB) copied, 0.836048 s, 321 MB/s

$ fusermount -u mnt

For comparison, here are archivemount's timings:

$ time archivemount zeroes-256mib.tar.gz mnt
real    0m0.581s

$ dd if=mnt/zeroes of=/dev/null status=progress
268435456 bytes (268 MB, 256 MiB) copied, 570.146 s, 471 kB/s

$ fusermount -u mnt

In this case, fuse-archive takes about the same time to load the archive as archivemount, but it is ~700× faster (0.83s vs 570s) to copy out the decompressed contents. This is because fuse-archive fully caches the archive and does not use archivemount's quadratic complexity algorithm.

RETURN VALUE

0 : Success.

1 : Generic error code for: missing command line argument, too many command line arguments, unknown option, mount point is not empty, etc.

10 : Cannot create the mount point.

11 : Cannot open the archive file.

12 : Cannot create the cache file.

13 : Cannot write to the cache file. This is most likely the indication that there is not enough temp space.

20 : The archive contains an encrypted file, but no password was provided.

21 : The archive contains an encrypted file, and the provided password does not decrypt it.

22 : The archive contains an encrypted file, and the encryption method is not supported.

30 : Cannot recognize the archive format.

31 : Invalid archive header.

32 : Cannot read and extract the archive.