fuse

Fuse is a virtual filesystem "helper" which makes possible to mount unusual things as a filesystem. It is achieved by using a simple program, which runs in user space, to provide data that can be represented by the fuse kernel module as a filesystem. The interpreter program is a less complex one than a kernel-space module, which is much harder to write. In Frugalware, regular users of a given box can mount filesystems by fuse. First as root, let’s install the tools needed:

# pacman-g2 -S fuse

Now, having the base of fuse, we need to install the programs for each specific filesystem type. To get a hint on what is available, you can issue the following command:

$ pacman-g2 -Ss fuse

The two most used (ftp, ssh) plugins can be installed by running the following command. Beware, the ftp fs is a perl module, and it seems a bit memory hungry / buggy / slow so therefore it might be replaced by CurlFtpFS in the future.

# pacman-g2 -S fuseftp sshfs-fuse

Then, you can mount a remote dir with sftp access as a regular user doing:

$ /sbin/mount.fuse  sshfs#YOURUSERNAME@SERVER:/REMOTEDIR /LOCALDIR -o rw,OTHEROPTIONS

You can also unmount it as a regular user doing:

$ fusermount -u /LOCALDIR