Re: mounting MC's FS

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hello!

>   I need to access various archives (such as ZIP, tar, tar.gz, ARJ, CPIO,
> CPIO.gz, etc) as plain files.
> 
>  I've noticed that MC can give access to these files when running MC 
> utility, but how can I access these files from scripts ? (such as 
> ls /mnt/mc/home/h010/my_zipfile.zip/dir2_in_zip/ or
> cat /mnt/mc/home/h010/my_zipfile.zip/dir2_in_zip/file13_in_zip.txt )
> 
>  Is MC somehow able to make its VFS "mountable", so one can achieve access 
> to these files through the regular filesystem ? (show above)

No.  VFS is a library that emulates a filesystem for the applications 
using VFS calls.  In its current form, VFS depends on some functions in 
the rest of MC code to ask for passwords and schedule cleanup for unused 
virtual filesystems.

There were attempts to make this library independent of MC.  I don't know
if they ever resulted in any stable software.  You can search the web for
"GNOME VFS" and "podfuk".

Anyway, MC never calls the kernel to register mountpoints, or it would 
have to be suid root on most operating systems.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin