Compressed Directories?

[pgarland at u.washington.edu]

A couple of possible partial solutions:

1. Linux does have the cramfs filesystem, but its read-only:
http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/v2.4/doc/filesystems/cramfs.txt.html
Using this may require you to compile it as sepatate

2. The zlibc library, allows for transparent readonly access to gzipped files:
http://zlibc.linux.lu/. 
I think most linux distros probably install this by default.

3. If you only need to edit text files (or if you enjoy editing binaries with a hex-editor), emacs has a solution, as it does for almost any of one's life problems: tar-mode, a mode that allows one to read and edit files in tar archives, compressed or uncompressed.

Documentation of tar-mode is at:
http://www.gnu.org/manual/emacs-21.2/html_node/emacs_167.html#SEC167

To automagically decompress compressed files, add this line to your .emacs.el file:
(setq auto-compression-mode t)

One downside to tar-mode is that it decompresses and parses the entire tarball, even if you only want to get at a single, small file. A possible work around to speed things up could be to recursively compress the directory, then tar the compressed files.

--Phillip
 
On Mon, 10 Jun 2002, Michal Guerquin wrote:

> .tar.gz files are great, but is there a way to compress an entire folder
> or directory, yet have it still be accessible like any other directory?
> I'm thinking of a tool that works on the file system layer and can
> compress/uncompress data on-the-fly. Stacker, Diskdoubler, etc. for
> BSD/Linux?
> 
> 
> ~ Michal
> --
> 
> Random:
> 
>   The goal of science is to build better mousetraps.
>   The goal of nature is to build better mice.
> 
> 
>