I'm trying to do something a bit out of the ordinary with the linux filesystem, and I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts as to whether it was possible with autofs. Normally with autofs, you cd into a directory, and the chdir() blocks until automount has a chance to mount another filesystem at your destination. What I would like to do is be able to make a directory tree on the fly in the current filesystem instead of mounting a new one. So, if /.autofs/ is on the root partition, then "cd /.autofs/temp" would run a program map script which would "mkdir /.autofs/temp; mkdir /.autofs/temp/link1; etc", where the details of the symlinks to be placed in that directory are decided by the program map script on the fly. Then, when the directory has been unused for the length of time specified in auto.master, it should be "rm -rf"ed instead of umounted. Is doing something like this even possible with autofs? The only thing I could think of is to have the program script copy a small blank formatted ext2 disk image, mount it over loopback, make subdirectories or symlinks in it, umount it, then spit out something like: "temp -fstype=ext2,ro,loop :/var/lib/autofs/image.5535" Even if this worked, it would be a slow and ugly hack... but simply making a directory rather than really mounting one would fail when umount() time came around. I know this is kind of stretching autofs, but I was hoping not to have to write a new filesystem driver when something so simple would work just as well for me. Any thoughts? --- Roy Stogner
