Re: Mounting tar files

[joekrahn <krahn at niehs dot nih dot gov>]

Ignazio Di Napoli wrote:
> 
> Hi all.
> I want to copy my Cygwin installation on my SD card. Since it's formed 
> by many small files, and my flash memory performance is very poor with 
> such files, I was wondering if there is some way to mount a tar file, or 
> something like, even if in read-only way, searching in the archive if 
> the file is not found in the "normal" directory and writing everything 
> in the latter.
> 
> Thank you,
> Ignazio
> 

An ISO-9660 image is sort of like a tar file, but with some extra overhead.
It sounds like you are trying to do something like Knoppix. They use a
compressed read-only filesystem for the base image, combined with a special
read/write filesystem (based on symlinks, I think) that holds actual file
data only for changed files.

Doing this in Windows would not be easy. There are some programs around that
mount ISO images as a virtual filesystem. But, if you have to install extra
support software, what is the point of installing Cygwin on an SD card? If
you want a portable Cygwin, why not put most of it onto a CD?
-- 
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