Mount archives for read/write under Ubuntu Linux - Archivemount

Archivemount is a FUSE based file system for Unix variants, including Linux. Its purpose is to mount archives to a mount point where it can be read from or written to as with any other file system. This makes accessing the contents of the archive, which may be compressed, transparent to other programs, without decompressing them. The archive formats that archivemount supports are:

 * Old-style tar archives, .
 * Most variants of the POSIX “ustar” format, .
 * The POSIX “pax interchange” format, .
 * GNU-format tar archives, .
 * Most common cpio archive formats, .
 * ISO9660 CD images (with or without RockRidge extensions), .
 * Zip archives. .
Two different variants of shar archives. . archivemount is FUSE (Filesystem in USErspace).

Archivemount Installation:
Open the terminal and type following command to install archivemount:

sudo apt-get install archivemount

Archivemount Usage:
Consider the gzipped tar archive test.tar.gz containing files, and an empty directory mount.

$ ls
test.tar.gz    mount/

Type the following command to mount the test.tar.gz under mount/ directory

$ archivemount test.tar.gz mount

$ ls mount
file1    file2
[... Perform desired read/write operations on the archive via mount/ ...]

$ umount mount
[... Any changes are saved to the archive ...]