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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?

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3 Answers 3

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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.

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  • 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
    Jan 8, 2017 at 0:30
  • I also had issues with archivemount & a ZIP file; about half of the directories inside simply wouldn't show up.
    – minexew
    Oct 27, 2021 at 20:30
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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.

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  • On modern Fedora Core (specifically Fedora Server v 37, installed January, 2023) it is not necessary to do anything further for it to just run. This comment might help others try it - I did and am very happy, thanks.
    – Richard T
    Feb 27, 2023 at 3:11
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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.

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  • 3
    Thanks for the effort you took to implement this! Looks at is EXACTLY what I require. I'll give it a try soon!
    – Regis May
    Mar 4, 2019 at 19:05
  • I red little your docs a ratarmount. How works refresh indexing? when i using ls, and when is new file just check system if exists? Interesting i looked like that feature for my 7tb images every time moving between new servers was hard, with one file tar, i can using Oct 18, 2021 at 1:45
  • @KamilDąbrowski I don't fully get your question but, normally, the index is only created if it could not be found or if the file size of the TAR archive did change. Did you copy the index to the new server, too? You could try to specify the index explicitly with ratarmount --index-file <file-path> .... If the index gets recreated, a warning message should appear. Maybe also try ratarmount -d 3 ... to increase the number of warnings. If you still have problems, please open an issue on Github.
    – mxmlnkn
    Oct 18, 2021 at 13:50
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    Impressive - I already love ratarmount for mounting big blob storage backups for a database for development.
    – thet
    Jan 9 at 15:47
  • @thet Thank you for the feedback. Seeing it being used keeps me motivated to maintain and improve it over the years. It has grown quite a bit since I added my answer here.
    – mxmlnkn
    Jan 10 at 21:41

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