In a recent development, the program RATARMOUNT 1.0.0 has been released, offering users the ability to work with archives in various formats as if they were conventional file systems. The utility supports working with RAR, ZIP, and TAR archives, compressed using BZIP2, GZIP, XZ, and ZSTD. RATARMOUNT is written in Python and utilizes the fusepy module and is licensed under MIT.
Unlike a similar utility like archivemount which uses the Libarchive library, RATARMOUNT preloads the contents of an archive to facilitate faster navigation for efficient access to data. Additionally, unlike the Python Module tarindexer, RATARMOUNT can handle compressed TAR archives and uses Fuse to enhance data access. The utility also employs parallelization of operations across different CPU cores during data unpacking.
RATARMOUNT offers the capability to mount archives located on remote hosts through protocols such as FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, SFTP, SSH, Git, GitHub, S3, SMBV2, SMBV3, and Dropbox, similar to how sshfs functions. Advanced features supported include recursive mounting (enabling an archive within another archive), mounting point imposition (e.g., applying an archive over a file system with newer versions of files), and creating a FS layer for writing on top of the archive (allowing changed and newly created files to be saved in a separate directory).