On December 2, 2012 8:01:12 PM Olaf van der Spek <ml@vdspek.org> wrote:
On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 5:44 PM, Andrey Semashev <andrey.semashev@gmail.com> wrote:
Does it provide any benefits compared to mounting a loop device and working with it through traditional file system interfaces? It seems odd to have a library duplicating file system operations.
Is it? We don't use loop devices to read/write tar/zip files, do we?
On OS X you do mount packages. You also typically mount various image files. Library-level access to conventional archive files is a legacy from older systems (read Windows and DOS) that did not support flexible mounting.
Can you even mount loop devices as unprivileged user?
Ok, you have a point about unprivileged mounting.
Does Windows even have loop devices?
According to Wikipedia, it does now. But then again, Windows is not the whole world.