> I'm wondering if anyone has ever tried to implement tar files as a filesystem
> in Linux ?
>
> It sounds to me like it would be simple (at least for the read-only case), and
> could be useful, eg. easily examining and extracting files from distributions
> of software, or recovering backups, without having to use special commands.
>
> Probably using compressed tar files ( *.tar.gz ) would be tricky and slow
> though I suspect, since decoding each byte depends on the whole earlier
> contents of the file (as I understand it).
It has been done. Look at
http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/podfuk/podfuk.html for hacked
nfs server which cooperates with midnight commander's libvfs to make
access to tar files transparent for you.
Pavel
-- The best software in life is free (not shareware)! Pavel GCM d? s-: !g p?:+ au- a--@ w+ v- C++@ UL+++ L++ N++ E++ W--- M- Y- R+- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/faq.html