Archivemount – Mount Zip, Rar, Tar, and Bz2 Archives
Hate unzipping an archive to view, or add files? Why not just mount the entire package and edit it like a regular folder. Archivemount does exactly this. On Ubuntu install the dependencies to build the binary. You need fuse, and its development package, and you need libarchive and its dev package. I forget the exact names of the files but use:
sudo apt-cache search fuse
I think the dev package for fuse is libfuse-dev. Then do the same for libarchive, which I think the dev package is libfuse-dev. With the dependencies satisfied download archivemount:
There is a pending request for a package to be added to the Ubuntu repositories, but everything works fine, and is rather straight forward when installing from source. Unzip the package, configure it, make it, and install it. It will now be a binary with a global path. The installer even adds a convenient nautilus script integrated into the right click drop down menu. Just right click on a compressed package and select archivemount. It will show up on your Ubuntu desktop just like a mounted partition or drive. Unmount by right clicking the mounted directory and selecting, you guessed it, unmount. Now zip up anything that you want to save space. Depending on the files you can save a small amount of space or a lot. With small text files, and source code you will save a fair amount, but with images and videos you will save less. You can probably zip your entire home directory and mount it on login. I’ll take a look at that when I have some time.
This is an interesting way to deal with file compression without compressing the entire filesystem.
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