[barrkel]

Applications of the same idea have been around for some time, e.g. Plan 9's file system (e.g. GUI elements are part of the FS, , bash's /dev/tcp/<host>/<port> etc., and indeed /proc's file system seen in Linux and, in a limited way, in Solaris.

Seems like no Linux app framework can be complete without reinventing its own virtual file system, with various syntaxes for paths to e.g. network shares but that are inaccessible when used on the command line, etc.

[price]

The point is that a FUSE filesystem is available from the command line and anywhere else, because it is an actual filesystem. RouteFS is a way of taking any virtual filesystem-like tree that you might find useful and making it available to the entire system as a normal filesystem, just as easily as you could describe the tree in any other form.

[barrkel]

I know all that. I was bitching about how it seems like every layer of the software cake on Linux likes to design its own virtual file system.