Hell Labs

The traditional method of dealing with filesystem images is to mount them as loopback devices, and that is a simple, elegant and universal way to change its contents in any way you feel fit. It has the disadvantage, however, of requiring superuser privileges — which you may not have in every host you frequent, or you wisely don’t wish to grant to anyone using your machine to develop filesystem images. Christian Hohnstädt’s e2fsimage solves the problem allowing one to copy an entire subtree into a image file, but what if you want to extract, examine or manipulate arbitrary content?

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