As the title states, I am looking to virtually merge two folders into one. These folders are extremely large and reside on separate drives (one is 1.4TB and the other is 2.7TB). I still plan to use the normal mount points for file and folder manipulation, but I want to combine them somewhere in a read-only status for display on my website (I set up windex as a fancy directory listing). There will be no duplicate names or folders in the merged folder. I have no desire to do raid or LVM with these drives and prefer to keep them physically separate.

Basically, I am working on setting up a basic listing of all my media content that is hosted for my htpc, but make it available to me to easily stream via my phone or laptop. I have everything already set up and it seems to work fine, but I want to do more pruning on the way things are listed. Currently all my ripped movies are on one drive and I have split my TV shows into two drives, one for ongoing series that I have ripped, and the other for series that have ended/been cancelled. I want to combine both the TV show folders into one folder that is displayed on the site. The drives are currently set up as:

What I want it to be is:

It's easy enough to just do a symlink for Movies/ in the folder I share, but what can I do for the TV shows? I've read about using cp -s (or -l) to make symlinks (or hardlinks) for all the files and folders, but this is something I'd have to run anytime I make changes to the filesystem, which I'd rather not deal with (even though I could semi-automate it with a script). Is there something that comes with Slackware that is able to do what I'm looking for?

I've read a bit about unionfs, mhddfs, and aufs, but they seem to tackle something much greater than I need (it seems all of them support writing to those directories, of which, I won't be doing as I'd access the direct location of the files whenever I make changes). However, if any of these are the best route to go, is there a suggestion on which one is best and if there's any slackbuilds available (aufs was available on slackbuilds.org back with 12.1 and I can probably use that as a starting point)?

Keep in mind, the folders under website.com will be read-only (and the website is password protected), so there is no reason to use a tool that allows read/write, unless that's the only tool available.

Thanks in advance for any insight on the matter.

May be https://github.com/rpodgorny/unionfs-fuse

Cheers

overlayfs is possibly a better choice than unionfs-fuse: it is included as standard in kernel 3.18 onwards, and the config for 3.18.1 is now in -current (see testing/source/config-testing-3.18.1/).

Otherwise you could use XStow (available from SlackBuilds.org) which will create and maintain a merged symlink tree for you. Despite the name XStow is not a gui application.
It works the same as Gnu Stow and there are lots of Gnu Stow tutorials on the net.

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Beautiful! I'm already running 3.18.0 (probably should upgrade to a newer one utilizing Pat's config instead of my own), so I'll have to give this a shot when I get home. Seems like I can just do the following:

I'll dig into this more when I get home. Thanks again!

Bummer... long story short, apparently I compiled my kernel without overlayfs

I figured I'd try mounting everything from my phone (JuiceSSH is an AMAZING program and blows other Android SSH apps out of the water). I kept running into syntax issues with my command, so I did more digging and realized, after looking at my .config, that I left CONFIG_OVERLAY_FS as not set. While I can start a kernel compile from my phone using screen (in case I get disconnected, I don't wouldn't want the compile to fail), I think I'll just wait until I get home and load up Pat's config (I already checked and he has enabled overlayfs) and probably give 3.18.4 a go.

Hopefully I'll get this up and running tonight, but my computer isn't as fast as it used to be...

Oh, I missed it. Thanks for pointing it out.


Cheers