I have a need to mount images of file systems for different purposes. To facilitate this I have added a line in my fstab that allows me to use an symlink and a directory in my home directory (I own both the link and directory).

/home/thomasl/.image /home/thomasl/image auto noauto,loop,suid,user 0 0

Basically I set the symlink to point to the image I want to mount and then run mount on the directory. (image.reiserfs is the partition image)

ln -s image.reiserfs .image
mount image

This mounts fine except for the fact that root now owns the directory that the image is mounted on. That means that I can not write to the file like I need to. Is there something in fstab I can add to be able to own the directory? Also is there a program that would allow me to do this? Keep in mind I don't want to have to log in as root to mount and chown the directory.

Thanks,
Thomas

check what your uid (UserID) and gid (Group ID) is with $ id.
E.g., they are both '1000'. Then add the mount options uid=1000 and gid=1000 to fstab. Now you and your group should be the owner of the mountpoint...

That seems to work for cdrom images, but for reiserfs I get this in the dmesg.

ReiserFS: loop0: warning: unknown mount option "uid=1000"

Ext3 doesn't seem to like it either, and I haven't tried ntfs or vfat yet.

I think the uid and gid options only work on non-native filesystems where munging of the UIDs is necessary. If files are owned by root on the images you'll need to chown/chmod them as necessary to the proper permissions. That will stick across remounts. The only reason the uid and gid options exist is as hacks for filesystems that don't have any permissions in them (e.g. vfat) or have permission schemes incompatible with Linux's.