Is it possible to mount a .tar file?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.