Re: [SLUG] transparently-decompressing filesystem

From: Eben King (eben01@verizon.net)
Date: Wed Dec 03 2008 - 22:44:28 EST


On Wed, 3 Dec 2008, Paul M Foster wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 03, 2008 at 07:04:06PM -0500, Eben King wrote:
>
>> I downloaded a bunch of PDBs (3D chemical models) from the nice folks at
>> wwdb.com and their rsync script. It's around 7.3 GiB when broken into
>> subdirectories and each subdir is tarred and bzipped, but around 40-45 GiB
>> decompressed. That's the sort of thing I can't justify keeping around
>> uncompressed, but the viewer doesn't dive into archives automatically. Is
>> there any sort of filesystem that stores data compressed then uncompresses
>> it automatically, sort of like Stacker for Linux? I guess if there were
>> software which enabled random access on a compressed file and I
>> loopback-mounted that file, that would work.
>
> My understanding is that mc and many other file managers will
> automatically decompress a file on the fly when you click on the
> filename.

> No, this isn't what you asked for, but I suspect it's easier than what
> you might have to go through to find and install a whole filesystem that
> does this.

They will. To do this, they decompress the entire thing into /tmp.
Unfortunately, this won't fit and it would take way long to decompress ~7
GiB of data first. Good start though. It does work rather nicely with
uncompressed tar files.

-- 
-eben   QebWenE01R@vTerYizUonI.nOetP   http://royalty.mine.nu:81
CANCER:  The position of Jupiter says that you should spend the
rest of the week face down in the mud.  Try not to shove a roll of
duct tape up your nose when taking your driver's test.  -- Weird Al
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