gzfuse is read-only gunzip loopback for fuse, allowing you to read transparently from a folder full of compressed files.
Just run gzfuse.py original-folder gunzip-folder, and now all .gz files
in original-folder are accessible in gunzip-folder, as they were plain
files.
Yeah, you can ask why doing a gunzip loopback for fuse, since there are already a bunch of transparent unpackers for fuse... Just look at the implementation. It's dead simple. So why not? Also, all others unpackers have their own format, and you can't be sure if you will really be able to read your files after a while. With gzfuse the problem is solved: it's just plain old gzip files!
The current gzfuse implementation should be considered experimental. It does require a lot more testing. And a rewrite in C, as it's currently written in Python.
So, to put here a nice list. gzfuse is currently:
- not enough tested
- rather slow
- single-theaded
- read-only
All these limitations are to be fixed in the future if there is an use for it.
The test folder is linux-3.3.3. 40,358 items, totalling 445.2 MB. After gzip, 127.3 MB.
# compress all files
$ find linux-3.3.3-gz -type f -exec gzip {} \;
# mount gzfuse folder
$ gzfuse.py linux-3.3.3-gz linux-3.3.3-gzfuse
# read all files
$ time find linux-3.3.3 -type f -exec cat {} \; > /dev/null
real 1m33.291s
user 0m7.132s
sys 0m28.132s
# read all files, transparent decompression
$ time find linux-3.3.3-gzfuse -type f -exec cat {} \; > /dev/null
real 1m59.485s
user 0m9.206s
sys 0m28.275s