Is it possible to mount a .tar file?

The only result of any import when I searched for this was from 2001.

In the intervening decade, have any tools/methods for mounting a tar file as a filesystem (perhaps utilizing fuse) been created?

If so, what are they, and how do they work?

warren

Posted 2011-04-02T16:07:24.570

Reputation: 8 599

25 years later, and someone benefits again from this question. – insaner – 2016-04-01T02:23:04.847

– Sathyajith Bhat – 2011-04-02T19:10:10.463

Answers

A friend posted me about archivemount (actual archive).

There's a bit of work to get it setup (ie, it's not merely yum install archivemount).

It needs libarchive and fuse-devel (yum install fuse-devel) installed.

warren

Posted 2011-04-02T16:07:24.570

Reputation: 8 599

In fact, it seems that at least with newer Ubuntu¹ versions it is possible to simply apt-get install archivemount. Then you can mount your archive as

archivemount [archive file] [mount point]

1: I tried in Ubuntu 13.04.

Thomas Arildsen

Posted 2011-04-02T16:07:24.570

Reputation: 727

Generally works fine in Ubuntu 16.04, although it failed for me with a large (18 GB) .7z archive: it just showed as empty. – BeeOnRope – 2017-01-08T00:30:09.563

I had problems with large tar files or with tars containing many files, so I created my own alternative to archivemount: ratarmount.

You can install it with pip3 install --user ratarmount. And then simply do ratarmount file.tar mountfolder and unmount with fusermount -u mountfolder.

mxmlnkn

Posted 2011-04-02T16:07:24.570

Reputation: 151

2Thanks for the effort you took to implement this! Looks at is EXACTLY what I require. I'll give it a try soon! – Regis May – 2019-03-04T19:05:49.137