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nrclark committed Nov 2, 2018
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## PartFS: A FUSE filesystem for accessing part of a file. ##
## Introduction ##

PartFS is an in-development filesystem that lets a user mount a part of a file
as a virtual file, with a user-specified offset and length.
PartFS is a FUSE-based tool for accessing a chunk of a SOURCE file as if it
were a separate file at MOUNTPOINT. It's intended for use in
creating/modifying disk image files.

This allows a user to access a single partition in a larger disk image, as
well as other similar tasks.
Say that SOURCE was a 600000-byte file with the following layout:

PartFS is a work in progress. Expect to see changes added soon.
[Region 1] Bytes 1 to 5000: Bootloader region
[Region 2] Bytes 5001 to 105000: System data
[Region 3] Bytes 105001 to 205000: System Partition
[Region 4] Bytes 205001 to 600000: User Data

PartFS would allow you to mount any of these regions and access them as if
they were standalone files. In the example given above, the correct mounting
parameters would be:

partfs SOURCE MOUNTPOINT -o offset=0,sizelimit=5000
partfs SOURCE MOUNTPOINT -o offset=5000,sizelimit=100000
partfs SOURCE MOUNTPOINT -o offset=105000,sizelimit=100000
partfs SOURCE MOUNTPOINT -o offset=205000,sizelimit=395000

Note that region 1 could also be mounted with no offset because it starts at
byte 0. Similarly, Region 4 could be mounted with no size-limit because it
goes to the end of the file.

PartFS is logically similar to a loopback-mounted image under Linux. It has
two key differences though. First, it can be done as an unprivileged user.
And second, it doesn't offer direct access to any filesystems stored
within the mounted image. Consider using with fuse2fs or a similar tool
or unprivileged filesystem access.

## Current Status ##

At the time of this writing, PartFS is released as version 1.0 with a functional
test suite. There are no currently-known bugs. Use with pride.

## License ##

PartFS is proudly released under GPL 2.0.

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