Favorite partitioning and mounting tricks

mount

We all know that mounting a new partition as /home and maybe /boot is extremely useful. Or mounting a remote directory as /opt can be great for sharing system tools. Are there any other, maybe more esoteric, uses for extra partitions or hard drives or nifty ways to mount external volumes? Maybe even if anyone also has windows machines *shudder*, post some cool tricks involving partitioning and hard drive mounting.

Best Answer

FUSE (Filesystem in USErspace) allows many things to be accessible as ordinary files (not an exhaustive list by any means):

There are also many FUSE filesystems that present a view of another filesystem with filtering, renaming or modified metadata or content:

  • Keep copies of all past versions of files with copyfs, waybackfs, ...
  • Log every action with loggedfs
  • Encrypt files transparently with encfs
  • Convert audio content with mp3fs
  • See a read-only view or change permissions with bindfs
  • See a partial read-only view with rofs-filtered
  • Convert file name character sets with convmvfs
  • Get a case-insensitive view with ciopfs

More possibilities on the FUSE site and elsewhere. You can also easily define your own in Erlang, Haskell, Lisp, Lua, Ocaml, Perl, Python, ...

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