Auto-mount like AVFS (or better) for transparent navigation

Basically, I expected something AVFS-esque, but couldn’t wrap my head how to achieve this with ratarmount. What AVFS currently does:

• mount whole “/” to ~/.avfs as FUSE
• when accessing archives under ~/.avfs/ (with # appended to path) it auto-mounts them to these paths e.g. ~/.avfs/tmp/bash-5.0.tar.gz#/

Improvement for above workflow would be to auto-unmount these bindmounts too, when e.g. lsof shows no program is using files under mountpoint (however better method would be desirable).

Primary usecase: integration with filemanagers, to jump into VFS folder when trying to open/preview archive. E.g. https://github.com/ranger/ranger/issues/456#issuecomment-797925011

[mxmlnkn]

I think I’ll close this for now with ed68786. Feel free to reopen or open another issue if the missing auto-“unmount” leads to some kind of performance problems. As discussed, the recursive mounting is done internally so it should be a bit more lightweight than a full system mount. One problem I can think of might be that the upper limit of open file handles might get hit when recursively mounting a thousand or so archives. That limit can be increased with ulimit though.

[mxmlnkn]

Let’s align our understanding

I see nothing wrong with what you said, including the performance downside.