The release of the ratarmount 1.0.0 program has taken place, allowing work with archives in various formats as if they were a regular file system. Supported formats include RAR and ZIP, as well as TAR archives compressed with bzip2, gzip, xz, and zstd. Data is extracted as needed without requiring the entire archive to be unpacked in advance. The utility's code is written in Python using the fusepy module and is distributed under the MIT license.
Unlike a similar utility, archivemount, which uses the libarchive library, ratarmount pre-indexes the contents for faster navigation within the archive, enabling efficient random access to data in very large archives. In contrast to the Python module tarindexer, ratarmount can work with compressed TAR archives and utilizes FUSE to simplify access to the data. Data unpacking uses parallel operations across different CPU cores.
It is possible to mount archives located on other hosts using protocols such as FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, SFTP, SSH, Git, Github, S3, SMBv2, SMBv3, and Dropbox, similar to the use of sshfs. It also supports advanced features like recursive mounting (one archive within another archive), overlaying mount points (for example, overlaying a file system of an archive with newer versions of files), and creating a writable file system layer over the data in the archive (modified and newly created files will be stored in a separate directory).
Source: opennet.ru
