archivemount

Mount an archive to a specific mountpoint

$ archivemount [path/to/archive] [path/to/mount_point]

$ archivemount -o readonly [path/to/archive] [path/to/mount_point]

$ fusermount -u [path/to/mount_point]

archivemount [options] archive mountpoint

archivemount is a FUSE-based filesystem that mounts archives as virtual directories. It supports a wide variety of archive formats including tar, zip, cpio, ISO 9660, and compressed variants (gzip, bzip2, xz, lzma).
Once mounted, the archive contents can be accessed like a normal directory. This is useful for browsing or extracting specific files from large archives without fully extracting them.

-o readonly

Mount the archive as read-only

Do not save changes to the archive when unmounting

Do not create a backup before modifying the archive

Run in foreground (do not daemonize)

Write support is experimental and may not work reliably with all archive formats. Modifications are buffered in memory and only written when unmounting, which can consume significant RAM for large changes. The archive format must be supported by libarchive.

archivemount was created as part of the FUSE ecosystem to provide transparent access to archive contents. It leverages libarchive for format support and has been available since the mid-2000s.

fusermount(1), tar(1), mount(8)