ARCHIVEMOUNT(1)

💅 ARCHIVEMOUNT(1) — General Commands Manual 💅

okay bestie, buckle up, because this is archivemount, and it's literally the coolest little trick in the whole Unix playbook ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

archivemount — mount an archive for access as a filesystem 💖

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

archivemount [-hVdf] [-o option[,option]…]… archive mountpoint

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So like. Through fuse(8), this thing mounts a whole file tree — the one chillin' inside archive — onto the directory mountpoint. That's it, that's the magic 🌈

And when you're done being obsessed with it, umount and fusermount -u can undo the whole mapping. no cap.

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🍓 EXAMPLES 🍓

bestie, watch this:

$ ls
files.tar.gz    mnt/
$ tar -tf files.tar.gz
file1           file2
$ archivemount files.tar.gz mnt
$ ls mnt
file1           file2
$ echo zupa > mnt/file3
$ rm mnt/file1
$ umount mnt
$ ls
files.tar.gz    files.tar.gz.orig       mnt/
$ tar -tf files.tar.gz
file2           file3

like… you literally edited a tarball in place and it just worked. main character energy, fr fr 👑

and here's the second one, the subtree slay:

$ tar -tf voreutils.tar.gz
src/            src/…
man/            man/aliases              man/basename.1
README.md
$ archivemount -o subtree=man voreutils.tar.gz mnt
$ ls mnt
aliases         basename.1

the way it just yeeted everything except man/ and stripped that prefix off too?? iconic. periodt. 💅

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

heads up: for the complete list of baseline FUSE options that are supported, go peek at fuse(8). 🫶 but these ones right here? archivemount handles them specially:

• -h, --help — writes the usage info AND all the available options out to the standard error stream, then dips. 👋
• -V, --version — writes the version of archivemount, libarchive, and FUSE to the standard output stream, then dips. ✌️

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• -r, -o ro, -o readonly — disables writes entirely. no writing, none, zero. 🙅♀️
• -o password — prompts you for the archive passphrase. 🔐
• -o nobackup — so when you save writes, the original archive gets moved to "archive.orig". this flag deletes that file afterward. 💀
• -o nosave — lets writes happen in memory, but doesn't actually write them out when you unmount. the vibes are temporary, bestie. 🫥

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• -o subtree=regex — hides all files that don't match regex, and for the ones that do match, it removes the matched prefix (peep the second example up there 👀). regex is a basic regular expression that behaves as-if it were prepended with the equivalent of ^.?. implies -r. 🌈
• -o formatraw — archive is actually a compressed file, made available under mounpoint/saved-filename or mounpoint/data. implies -r. 🌟

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💀 BUGS 💀

Writing archives, probably. 😭 (not me being honest)

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🧚 ARCHIVE FORMATS 🧚

libarchive(3) has the definitive list if you wanna go read it, but basically: all kinds of tar/ustar/pax/cpio archives, 7-Zip, ISO9660, ar, and RAR/Zip may all be read. 👑

and those can be compressed with gzip(1), xz(1), zstd(1), &c. — and all of it gets processed transparently, no extra work from you. 💖

same deal applies for writing… except you can't write RARs. 🚫

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• fusermount(1)
• libarchive(3)
• regex(7)
• fuse(8)
• umount(8)

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omg and before you go — this whole page is from archivemount-ng, version 1b-1build1, dated February 3, 2026. mwah 💋 go mount something ✨🦋🌸