user mounted filesystems

Rather than mount a filesystem as root (whether from the command line or through /etc/fstab), non-privileged users can make use of the fuse (filesystem in userspace) system. This requires the installation of the fuse-utils package, and the user has to be added to the fuse group.

There are a number of useful systems implemented on top of fuse.

For example, an ISO system might be required to run a particular application, and just mounted temporarily by the user executing the application. The fuseiso package implements this. To mount the file system:
Another example is an encrypted directory tree. The encfs package implements this. Any file added to the mount point tree is stored on the original filesystem in an encrypted form (though note that file metadata is not encrypted). To mount the filesystem:
If the encryption-directory does not exist, it is created and the user interactively supplies encryption options.

Unmounting is the same for most of the fuse based filesystems: