[Wlug] FUSE??

[Jamie Guinan]

Hi,

On Sat, 12 Aug 2006, ken jones wrote:

> Would somebody please explain to me what exactly FUSE does?

"With FUSE it is possible to implement a fully functional filesystem 
in a userspace program."

Why is this good?  Because *anything* you can think of that you'd like 
to access as a filesystem, you can, without writing a kernel driver.

  http://fuse.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/FileSystems

It works via the fuse module, /dev/fuse, and some (transparent) 
helper programs.

> What good is FUSE to me?  I've Googled till the cows come home, but I do 
> not understand the responses.

I've been using the "sshfs" fuse module, and its one of the greatest 
things I've experienced in Linux in recent years.

Lets say you have ssh access to another machine, you need to have FUSE 
support on your local kernel, then its just a matter of,
  
  mkdir ~/ssh/otherhost
  sshfs -o idmap=user me at otherhost:/ ~/ssh/otherhost
  ls ~/ssh/otherhost

It sets up an sftp (ssh ftp protocol) session in the background,
and I can now access whatever files I would have access to via
ssh/sftp, right on my local system.  Basically, it reduces,

  ssh otherhost
  cd somedir/
  $EDITOR foo.txt
  exit

to,

  cd ssh/otherhost/somedir/
  $EDITOR foo.txt

Working with files reduces to "mv", "cp", etc.

No need for kioslaves, gnome-vfs, or other such madness.

When I'm done,

  fusermount -u ~/ssh/otherhost

At least on the small scale, which is all I really care about, it is 
SO much easier than setting up NFS, I don't even build NFS support 
into my kernels anymore.  *No* setup is required on the other side 
(other than running sshd), no root access required on local side.

I wouldn't be surprised if Plan9 and other OSs have had similar 
capabilities, but I haven't spent enough time with them, maybe 
someone else can comment.  In any case, it works on Linux, and 
I'm happy.

-Jamie