Patch for avfs to show "magic" dirs

Suggestion to improve its usability

AVFS is a FUSE filesystem which lets you look into archives without extracting them. However, it doesn't show them - you're expected to add the magic # symbol to filename in order to use avfs features:

[lex@flower2 test]$ ls -lah
total 4.7M
drwxr-xr-x 1 lex lex 4.0K Mar 22 13:58 .
drwx------ 1 lex lex  72K Mar 22 13:58 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 lex lex 2.3M Feb  3  2018 cfengine-3.10.3.tar.gz

[lex@flower2 test]$ ls -lah cfengine-3.10.3.tar.gz#
total 2.3M
drwxr--r--  1 lex lex  2.3M Feb  3  2018 .
drwxr-xr-x  1 lex lex  4.0K Mar 22 13:58 ..
drwxr-xr-x 20 lex root    0 Feb  2  2018 cfengine-3.10.3

[lex@flower2 test]$ ls -lah cfengine-3.10.3.tar.gz#/* | head
total 3.7M
drwxr-xr-x 20 lex root    0 Feb  2  2018 .
drwxr--r--  1 lex lex  2.3M Feb  3  2018 ..
-rwxr--r--  1 lex root  40K Feb  2  2018 aclocal.m4
-rwxr--r--  1 lex root 6.3K Feb  2  2018 AUTHORS
drwxr-xr-x  2 lex root    0 Feb  2  2018 cf-agent
drwxr-xr-x  2 lex root    0 Feb  2  2018 cf-execd
drwxr-xr-x  2 lex root    0 Feb  2  2018 cf-key
drwxr-xr-x  2 lex root    0 Feb  2  2018 cf-monitord
drwxr-xr-x  2 lex root    0 Feb  2  2018 cf-promises

This patch makes avfs show the otherwise-invisible "magic" directory in this case:

[lex@flower2 test]$ ls -lah
total 4.7M
drwxr-xr-x 1 lex lex 4.0K Mar 22 13:58 .
drwx------ 1 lex lex  72K Mar 22 13:58 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 lex lex 2.3M Feb  3  2018 cfengine-3.10.3.tar.gz
drwxr--r-- 1 lex lex 2.3M Feb  3  2018 cfengine-3.10.3.tar.gz#

Note that it does so by only inspecting file extension, and not the file format itself. Moreover, avfs supports specifying which archiver to use - so if you have a tarball renamed to *.bak, you can still access it by specifying #utar, like this:

[lex@flower2 test]$ mv cfengine-3.10.3.tar.gz{,.bak}

[lex@flower2 test]$ ls -lah cfengine-3.10.3.tar.gz.bak#ugz#utar
total 4.0K
drwxr-xr-x  3 lex lex     0 Feb  2  2018 .
drwxr-xr-x  1 lex lex  4.0K Mar 22 14:41 ..
drwxr-xr-x 20 lex root    0 Feb  2  2018 cfengine-3.10.3

This case is not supported by this patch (i.e. you won't see this directory with ls, but you still can cd into it and ls its content, like shown above).

To build avfs with this patch, first clone the official AVFS repo with git:

git clone https://git.code.sf.net/p/avf/git avf-git

And then follow the official build instructions for AVFS, but just before make step run the following:

wget http://alexey.shpakovsky.ru/en/avfs-dirs.patch
git apply avfs-dirs.patch

Then mount avfs as usual and enjoy!