4 ms·
I remember back on my Amiga pretty much anything could be represented as a filesystem. This lead to lots of weird things being implemented (like a reboot-persi
by trezor 16y ago
I remember back on my Amiga pretty much anything could be represented as a filesystem.
This lead to lots of weird things being implemented (like a reboot-persistent ram-drive), but one of the things I remember distinctly is the tar-example you mentioned (except it was lzh/lha). You would literally do cd myArchive.lha and that was it. This was a legitimate file-system path where you could do whatever you wanted. Operations may have been slow on bigger archives, but you could treat it as just another directory. It was very neat.
I've always missed having that feature in sub-sequent OSes I've used and I'm very disappointed it's been 10 years and seemingly the best we have these days is Windows Explorer's Zip-support.
- grncdr 16y agoThe Xbox Media Center has supported transparent access to multiple archival formats with a variety of compressions (including transparently folding multi-file archives into one file) for years. It's an illusion implemented in user space and not a part of the operating system itself, but in practice there's no difference to the user.
- drdaeman 16y agoGNU/Linux systems do this too with GnomeVFS/GVFS and KIO. Unfortunately, they are only usable if all applications you use that are aware of them. This is why filesystems should be connected to some central place (in GNU/Linux that's the kernel VFS switch).
- ciupicri 16y agoThe latest GNOME doesn't have this limitation because it uses FUSE. Any application, e.g. vim can use those files.
- drdaeman 16y agoExcept for a problem, that you have to mount (by accessing) GVFS-filesystem first. If you're using Nautilus to navigate to the file and start vim — it's fine, but it won't work for any non-GIO file browsing (bash, mc, emacs-dired, gmplayer, ...)