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SubjectRe: NTFS-like streams?

# The same thing can be conceptually used to create that wet dream of user
# mounts: going "inside" tar-files by just mounting them as a
# mini-filesystem on top of the file that is the tar archive. The strongest
# argument against that is probably the fact that "tar" is not that great a
# filesystem format ;)

This is one of the things I liked about Windows 95's Powertoys - it came
with a utility which let you treat a .CAB (Microsoft's zip/tar
replacement - goodness knows why the existing formats weren't adequate) -
as a directory, from the user perspective. Worked neatly, although it was
read-only - but for the most part, that was all you needed (a nice method
for extracting files from an archive).

Being able to do..

$ cp files.tar.gz/docs/mydoc1.txt .

Would be useful.

Being able to do..

$ cp mydoc1.txt files.tar.gz/docs/

Would be nice, but would be a pain to implement (and probably as slow as

If 'tarfs' was ever implemented, I could see it being a read-only
filesystem, for precisely this reason.

Mo McKinlay Chief Software Architect inter/open Labs

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