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I am wondering if it’s possible to write an application that will access a foreign filesystem, but without needing support for that filesystem from the operating system. For example, I’d like to write an app in C that runs on Mac OS X that can browse / copy files from an ext2/ext3 formatted disk. Of course, you’d have to do all the transfers through the application (not through the system using cp or the Finder), but that would be OK for my purpose. Is this possible?
There are user space libraries that allow you to access file systems.
The Linux-NTFS library (libntfs) allows you to access NTFS file systems and there are user space programs like
ntfsfixto do things to the file system.E2fsprogs does the same for ext2, ext3 and ext4 filesystems.
As Basile mentioned, Mtools is another one that provides access to FAT partitions.
There was even a program that does exactly what you’re looking for on Windows. It’s called ext2explore and allows you to access ext2 partitions from Windows.