[TriLUG] non-root partial view of file?

[Bill Farrow]

On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 8:41 AM, Kevin Hunter Kesling
<hunteke at earlham.edu> wrote:
> Awesome.  Now my (perhaps academic) questions: why do I need root to work
> with only a section of these large files?  Well, I assume because that's how
> the partition-level tools (e.g., e2fsprogs) are written.  But is there not a
> method for encapsulating access like this that does *not* require root?  I
> mean, at the point I'm writing bits to a single file, why do I need special
> authority?

I believe that the "mount" command is potentially dangerous from a
security point of view. Some desktop environments like Gnome use
special services to allow a user to mount USB drives, so that might be
something to looking into.

You should also look at the FUSE userspace filesystem project.
  http://fuse.sourceforge.net/
  https://github.com/gerard/ext4fuse/


Bill