i never really thought about it until today, but the FUSE project is pretty cool. my first real experience with it was actually using MacFUSE so that i can read and write to NTFS partitions with a mac.

but what is REALLY cool are the 3rd party file systems people write on top of FUSE. there are two today that i discovered that, though i’m not sure there’s any practical use yet, seem really cool.

GmailFS is a file system that uses a gmail account as storage. the libgmail project has been abandoned, but there’s a patch that seems to get authentication working. it’s a little buggy (i can cp files in and out of the FS, but i can’t seem to do an ls) i think it used to work at one time, so i might dig a little deeper. but this is the only way i know of to use gmail as storage in linux.

sshfs is a file system that will let you mount a remote host via ssh. very neat. i think that it uses the sftp service to do all the reads and writes and by default i think it caches results locally for 20 seconds or so (but can be overriden), but the concept it very cool. all you need on the remote host is ssh access. no need to setup NFS or anything else. this might come in handy. what does break, though, are absolute symbolic links. can’t win ’em all.