GmailFS – Gmail Filesystem

GmailFS – Gmail Filesystem

GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium. GmailFS is a Python application and uses the FUSE userland filesystem infrastructure to help provide the filesystem, and libgmail to communicate with Gmail.

GmailFS supports most file operations such as read, write, open, close, stat, symlink, link, unlink, truncate and rename. This means that you can use all your favourite unix command line tools to operate on files stored on Gmail (e.g. cp, ls, mv, rm, ln, grep etc. etc.).

Please be gentle on the Python code. This is my first foray into Python and I’m sure the code is far from elegant. I’m particularly concerned with my attempts to manipulate mutable byte arrays in Python. I’m sure that there must be a less clumsy way of doing it than the nasty list -> array -> string path I’m currently using. Python has a reputation as an excellent language choice for rapid prototyping. The first working version of GmailFS took about 2 days of coding. There was an additional 1.5 days spent on performance tuning and bugfixing. Given that this includes language learning curve, Python’s reputation seems well deserved.

Looks like someone went and actually implemented the a system kind of a little bit similar to an idea I had when I first heard about gmail. Awesome. (Link via Boing Boing via Waxy.)