Overview

bindfs is a FUSE filesystem for mounting a directory to another location, similarly to mount --bind. The permissions inside the mountpoint can be altered using various rules.

Examples

Here are some examples of what bindfs can do for you:

• Make a directory read-only for non-root users.

bindfs --perms=a-w somedir somedir

• Share a directory with some other users without modifying /etc/group.

bindfs --mirror-only=joe,bob,@wheel ~/some/dir shared

• Make your website available to the webserver process read-only.

bindfs --owner=www --perms=0000:u=rD ~/stuff/website ~/public_html

• Make all new files uploaded to an FTP share owned by you and seen by everyone.

bindfs --create-for-user=me --create-with-perms=u+rw,a+rD /var/ftp/uploads /var/ftp/uploads

Manual

• bindfs --help
• man 1 bindfs

Support

bindfs has been tested on Linux 2.4/2.6 with fuse 2.5.3+, Mac OS X 10.5 with MacFUSE and FreeBSD with fuse4bsd.

Basic installation instructions are available.

All FUSE filesystems necessarily incur a performance penalty in CPU time and memory consumption. While bindfs is very flexible, it can be quite slow as Guy Paddock's analysis and benchmark demonstrates. If all you need is read-only support then mount --bind -r is more efficient.

All bug reports, comments and ideas are very welcome at <martin dot partel at gmail dot com> or the issue tracker.

Downloads and source

bindfs is available through the software repositories of many Linux distributions, as well as MacPorts on OS X. Source code is on GitHub. Source releases, issue tracking and this home page remain on Google Code.