alt Hacker NewsVery cool, I wish there were something similar to this for filesystem images though.
Just recently I needed to somehow generate a .tar.gz from a .raw ext4 image and, surprisingly, there's still no better option than actually mounting it and then creating an archive.
I managed to "isolate" it a bit with guestfish's tar-out, but still it's pretty slow as it needs to seek around the image (in my case over NBD) to get the actual files.
There are surprisingly few tools to work on file system images in the Linux world, they expect loopback mounting to always be available.
There are a few libraries to read ext4 but every time I've tried to use one it missed one feature that my specific image was using (mke2fs changes its defaults every couple years to rely on newer ext4 features).
7-zip can also read ext4 to some degree and, I'm not sure but, they seem to have written a naive parser of their own to do it: https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip/blob/master/CPP/7zip/Archive...