FUSE (Linux)
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| Supported platforms: Linux/Linux | ||||
| Categories: Development Tools | ||||
Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) is a Linux kernel module that allows non-privileged users to create their own file systems without the need to write any kernel code. This is achieved by running the file system code in user space, while the FUSE module only provides a "bridge" to the actual kernel interfaces. FUSE was officially merged into the mainstream Linux kernel tree in kernel version 2.6.14.
FUSE is not limited to, but particularly useful for writing virtual file systems. As opposed to traditional filesystems which essentially save data to and retrieve data from disk, virtual filesystems do not actually store data itself. They act as a view or translation of an existing filesystem or storage device. In principle, any resource available to FUSE implementation can be exported as a file system. See Examples for some of the possible applications.
The FUSE system was originally part of the A Virtual Filesystem (AVFS) project, but has since split off into its own project on SourceForge.
Examples
- SSHFS: Provides access to a remote filesystem through SSH
- GmailFS: Filesystem which stores data as mail in Gmail
- WikipediaFS: View and edit Wikipedia articles as if they were real files
- EncFS: Encrypted virtual filesystem
- FuseFS
- ntfsmount: Provides safe, read-write NTFS access from Linux and FreeBSD
