archivemount - Man Page

mounts an archive for access as a file system

Examples (TL;DR)

Mount an archive to a specific mountpoint: archivemount path/to/archive path/to/mount_point

Synopsis

archivemount [-hVdfs] [-o options] archivepath mountpoint

The archivemount command mounts the file tree contained in the archive archivepath on the directory mountpoint. The archive's contents can subsequently be accessed inside mountpoint as a file system. The umount(8) command performs the corresponding unmount operation.

archivemount is known to work under both linux and Mac OS X (via MacFUSE).

Example Session

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

$ ls
files.tgz    mnt/

$ archivemount files.tgz mnt

$ ls mnt
file1    file2

[... Perform desired read/write operations on the archive via mnt/ ...]

$ umount mnt

[... Any changes are saved to the archive ...]

Archive Formats

Archive format support is provided by the libarchive(3) library. Read operations are supported for:

old-style tar archives,
most variants of the POSIX “ustar” format,
the POSIX “pax interchange” format,
GNU-format tar archives,
most common cpio archive formats,
ISO9660 CD images (with or without RockRidge extensions),
Zip archives.

Archives compressed with gzip(1), bzip2(1), or compress(1) are automatically detected and transparently decompressed.

The following formats can be written:

POSIX-standard “ustar” archives,
POSIX “pax interchange format” archives,
POSIX octet-oriented cpio archives,
two different variants of shar archives.

Before writing, the original archive is renamed with a “.orig” extension appended to it. More detail about the read/write support can be found in the libarchive(3) documentation.

Options

archivemount is built upon the FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) library, and the complete set of available options depends upon the specific FUSE implementation. Execute archivemount -h to retrieve a definitive list.

general options

-o opt,[opt...]: mount options
-h --help: print help
-V --version: print version

archivemount mount options

-o readonly: disable write support
-o password: prompt for a passphrase
-o nobackup: remove archive file backups
-o subtree=<regex>: mount only subtree of archive, strip subtree part from path

FUSE mount options

These options are available to linux users using standard FUSE.

-d -o debug: enable debug output (implies -f)
-f: foreground operation
-s: disable multi-threaded operation
-o allow_other: allow access to other users
-o allow_root: allow access to root
-o nonempty: allow mounts over non-empty file/dir

-o default_permissions enable permission checking by kernel

-o fsname=NAME: set filesystem name
-o subtype=NAME: set filesystem type
-o large_read: issue large read requests (2.4 only)
-o max_read=N: set maximum size of read requests
-o hard_remove: immediate removal (don't hide files)
-o use_ino: let filesystem set inode numbers
-o readdir_ino: try to fill in d_ino in readdir
-o direct_io: use direct I/O
-o kernel_cache: cache files in kernel
-o [no]auto_cache: enable caching based on modification times
-o umask=M: set file permissions (octal)
-o uid=N: set file owner
-o gid=N: set file group
-o entry_timeout=T: cache timeout for names (1.0s)
-o negative_timeout=T: cache timeout for deleted names (0.0s)
-o attr_timeout=T: cache timeout for attributes (1.0s)
-o ac_attr_timeout=T: auto cache timeout for attributes (attr_timeout)
-o intr: allow requests to be interrupted
-o intr_signal=NUM: signal to send on interrupt (10)
-o modules=M1[:M2...]: names of modules to push onto filesystem stack
-o max_write=N: set maximum size of write requests
-o max_readahead=N: set maximum readahead
-o async_read: perform reads asynchronously (default)
-o sync_read: perform reads synchronously
-o atomic_o_trunc: enable atomic open+truncate support

MacFUSE mount options

These options are available to Mac users using MacFUSE.

-o allow_other: allow access to others besides the user who mounted the file system
-o allow_recursion: allow a mount point that itself resides on a MacFUSE volume (by default, such mounting is disallowed)
-o allow_root: allow access to root (can't be used with allow_other)
-o auto_xattr: handle extended attributes entirely through ._ files
-o blocksize=SIZE: specify block size in bytes of "storage"
-o case_insensitive: enable case-insensitive mode
-o daemon_timeout=T: timeout in seconds for kernel calls to daemon
-o debug: turn on debug information printing
-o default_permissions: let the kernel handle permission checks locally
-o defer_permissions: defer permission checks to file operations themselves
-o direct_io: use alternative (direct) path for kernel-user I/O
-o extended_security: turn on Mac OS X extended security (ACLs)
-o fsid=FSID: set the second 32-bit component of the fsid
-o fsname=NAME: set the file system's name
-o fssubtype=NUM: set the file system's fssubtype identifier
-o fstypename=NAME: set the file system's type name
-o iosize=SIZE: specify maximum I/O size in bytes
-o jail_symlinks: contain symbolic links within the mount
-o kill_on_unmount: kernel will send a signal (SIGKILL by default) to the daemon after unmount finishes
-o local: mark the volume as “local” (default is “nonlocal”)
-o negative_vncache: enable vnode name caching of non-existent objects
-o volname=NAME: set the file system's volume name
-o noalerts: disable all graphical alerts (if any) in MacFUSE Core
-o noappledouble: ignore Apple Double (._) and .DS_Store files entirely
-o noapplexattr: ignore all “com.apple.*” extended attributes
-o nobrowse: mark the volume as non-browsable by the Finder
-o nolocalcaches: meta option equivalent to noreadahead,noubc,novncache
-o noping_diskarb: do not ping Disk Arbitration (pings by default)
-o noreadahead: disable I/O read-ahead behavior for this file system
-o nosynconclose: disable sync-on-close behavior (enabled by default)
-o nosyncwrites: disable synchronous-writes behavior (dangerous)
-o noubc: disable the unified buffer cache for this file system
-o novncache: disable the vnode name cache for this file system
-o hard_remove: immediate removal (don't hide files)
-o use_ino: let filesystem set inode numbers
-o readdir_ino: try to fill in d_ino in readdir
-o direct_io: use direct I/O
-o kernel_cache: cache files in kernel
-o [no]auto_cache: enable caching based on modification times
-o umask=M: set file permissions (octal)
-o uid=N: set file owner
-o gid=N: set file group
-o entry_timeout=T: cache timeout for names (1.0s)
-o negative_timeout=T: cache timeout for deleted names (0.0s)
-o attr_timeout=T: cache timeout for attributes (1.0s)
-o ac_attr_timeout=T: auto cache timeout for attributes (attr_timeout)
-o intr: allow requests to be interrupted
-o intr_signal=NUM: signal to send on interrupt (30)
-o modules=M1[:M2...]: names of modules to push onto filesystem stack
-o max_write=N: set maximum size of write requests
-o max_readahead=N: set maximum readahead
-o async_read: perform reads asynchronously (default)
-o sync_read: perform reads synchronously

Module options

[subdir]
-o subdir=DIR: prepend this directory to all paths (mandatory)
-o [no]rellinks: transform absolute symlinks to relative
[iconv]
-o from_code=CHARSET: original encoding of file names (default: UTF-8)
-o to_code=CHARSET: new encoding of the file names (default: ISO-8859-2)

License

This software is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Library General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Library General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Library General Public License along with this software; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA