Linux - Is there a way to mount a compressed file that is not an archive?

Question

It's possible to mount a compressed archive in Linux as if it were a directory using tools like archivemount or gvfsd-mount, both of which depend on libarchive. This only works for "proper archives", though; collections of multiple files with a directory structure. Is there a way to mount single compressed files? In other words, mount a .bz2 as opposed to a .tar.bz2.

Previous discussions:

• Mount a compressed file as a folder?
• Archive Mounter cannot mount single-file archives like .bz2

Answer 1

Why, yes there is, sort of. There's a FUSE filesystem called fuseflt that does almost what you want. Rather than mounting a single file, it mounts a directory. Within the mount, you can set up arbitrary filters. The documentation gives your specific example: mounting a directory full of zipped files so that they appear to be unzipped.