A simple FUSE filesystem that makes symlinks look like actual files.
You can compile the package into an executabe by running make. The output is titled 'hide-symlinks'. The idea is based on this blog post.
You can run it by calling the executable like so: ./hide-symlinks <root> <mount-point>, where <root> is the directory to be mirrored or looped, and
<mount-point> is the (empty) directory to mount the new fuse filesystem.
You can mount it in /etc/fstab by adding a line like so:
/path/to/hide-symlinks#/path/to/root /path/to/mount fuse user,allow_other,noexec 0 0
Note that the hide-symlinks executable path and root directory are separated by a "#".
Alternatively, if you run sudo make install to copy the binary into /usr/bin
you can mount it using the now-preferred method for FUSE filesystems (specifying
the binary with the FS subtype):
/path/to/root /path/to/mount fuse.hide-symlinks user,allow_other,noexec 0 0
In these examples, I use the 'user' option to allow any user to mount the filesystem and 'allow_other' to allow any user to access the filesystem. These are not strictly necessary, but because /etc/fstab entries which are auto mounted are done so by root, only root can access the filesystem without 'allow_other'. And, if it is not auto mounted, without the 'user' option only root can mount it.
The filesystem relies on fusepy, and
uses the Loopback example included with fusepy as a base class. It simply
changes the getattr operation to use the os.stat call instead of the os.lstat
call, effectively hiding symlinks. I also removed the symlink operation (which
seems to have issues, though it does work). Otherwise, all operations work as
normal for a loopback filesystem (e.g. writes and reads defer to the <root>
directory).