I'm trying to solve the problem that I have two OS (Windows 7/Debian) which I want to enable to share certain data from lets say Firefox/Iceweasel.My SetupBasically there's profile folder A on an NTFS-Volume. Inside this folder there are a lot of files which both browsers under their specific OS need, that could be shared without a problem. But there's also file A/b which makes sharing difficult or uncomfortable. The file might exist under both OS but should be OS specific.Is there a way to mask this (or others also...) file with it's OS specific variant which might be located at a different folder via mount or symlinks?Or do I have do go the other way around and create an artificial folder and place symlinks to every shared resource except from the OS specific ones?
Is it possible to mask a file with a different one?
linux;mount;windows;firefox;thunderbird
Shadowing files on a directory tree is what union mounts are all about. Linux offers several union filesystems; unfortunately, some are badly documented or unmaintained.For your use case, a FUSE-based solution that doesn't require privileges seems best. The most promising candidate would be unionfs-fuse.unionfs-fuse /home/xmoex/local/firefox=RW:/media/ntfs/Users/xmoex/Firefox=RW ~/.mozilla/firefox/myprofileThis works, in that the files in ~/.mozilla/firefox/myprofile are those in /home/xmoex/local/firefox if present, and those in /media/ntfs/Users/xmoex/Firefox if not present. However, it has the defect that if a file is modified by a create-move method (as opposed to being written to in place), the new file will always end up on the same branch, not on the branch that it's replacing.Reasonably recent Linux kernels include aufs, which has stabilized lately. It has the downside that only root can mount it (or delegate the privilege to mount an instance e.g. via /etc/fstab). I think it can express this file name must be on this branch, but I don't know how.