Content-type: text/html Manpage of NTFS-3G

NTFS-3G

Section: Maintenance Commands (8)
Updated: July 2006
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NAME

ntfs-3g - Third Generation NTFS Driver

SYNOPSIS

ntfs-3g device mount_point [-o options]

DESCRIPTION

ntfs-3g is a user space NTFS driver, which can create, remove, rename files, directories, hard links, or streams; it can read and write files, including streams and sparse files; it can handle special files like symbolic links, devices, and FIFOs; moreover it can also read compressed files.

OPTIONS

Below is a summary of the options that ntfs-3g accepts.

uid=, gid=, umask=: Provide default owner, group, and access mode mask. These options work as documented in mount(8). By default, the files/directories are owned by user that mounted volume and he/she has read and write permissions, as well as browse permission for directories. No one else has any access permissions. I.e. the mode on all files is by default rw------- and for directories rwx------, a consequence of the default fmask=0177 and dmask=0077. Using a umask of zero will grant all permissions to everyone, i.e. all files and directories will have mode rwxrwxrwx.
fmask=, dmask=: Instead of specifying umask which applies both to files and directories, fmask applies only to files and mask only to directories.
show_sys_files: If show_sys_files is specified, show the system files in directory listings. Otherwise the default behaviour is to hide the system files. Note that even when show_sys_files is specified, "$MFT" may will not be visible due to bugs in glibc. Furthermore, note that irrespectively of show_sys_files, all files are accessible by name, i.e. you can always do "ls -l '$UpCase'" for example to show the system file containing the Unicode upcase table.
default_permissions: By default FUSE doesn't check file access permissions, the filesystem is free to implement it's access policy or leave it to the underlying file access mechanism (e.g. in case of network filesystems). This option enables permission checking, restricting access based on file mode. This is option is usually useful together with the 'allow_other' mount option.
allow_other: This option overrides the security measure restricting file access to the user mounting the filesystem. This option is by default only allowed to root, but this restriction can be removed with a configuration option described in the previous section.
large_read: Issue large read requests. This can improve performance for some filesystems, but can also degrade performance. This option is mostly useful on 2.4.X kernels, as on 2.6 kernels requests size is automatically determined for optimum performance.
max_read=: With this option the maximum size of read operations can be set. The default is infinite. Note that the size of read requests is limited anyway to 32 pages (which is 128kbyte on i386).
force: Force mount even if errors occurred. Use this option only if you know what are you doing.
ro: Mount filesystem read-only.
no_def_opts: By default ntfs-3g acts as "default_permissions,allow_other" was passed to it, this option cancel this behaviour.
silent: Do nothing on chmod and chown operations, but do not return error.
locale=: You can set locale with this option. It's useful if locale environment variables are not set before partitions had been mounted from /etc/fstab.
streams_interface=: This option controls how the user can access named data streams. It can be set to, one of none, windows or xattr. If the option is set to none, the user will have no access to the named data streams. If it's set to windows, then the user can access them just like in Windows (eg. cat file:stream). If it's set to xattr, then the named data streams are mapped to xattrs and user can manipulate them using {get,set}fattr utilities.
debug: Makes ntfs-3g to not detach from terminal and print a lot of debug output from libntfs-3g and FUSE.
no_detach: Same as above but with less debug output.

DATA STREAMS

All data on NTFS is stored in streams. Every file has exactly one unnamed data stream and can have many named data streams. The size of a file is the size of its unnamed data stream. By default, ntfs-3g will only read the unnamed data stream.

By using the options "streams_interface=windows", you will be able to read any named data streams, simply by specifying the stream's name after a colon. For example:

cat some.mp3:artist

Windows applications don't, consistently, allow you to read named data streams, so you are recommended to use tools like FAR, or utils from Cygwin.

Named data streams act like normals files, so you can read from them, write to them and even delete them (using rm). You can list all the named data streams a file has by getting the "ntfs.streams.list" extended attribute.

EXAMPLES

Mount /dev/hda1 to /mnt/windows using ntfs-3g:

ntfs-3g /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows

Read-only mount /dev/hda5 to /home/user/mnt and make user with uid 1000 to be owner of all files:

ntfs-3g /dev/hda5 /home/user/mnt -o ro,uid=1000

/etc/fstab entry for above:

/dev/hda5 /home/user/mnt ntfs-3g ro,uid=1000 0 0

Umount /mnt/windows:

fusermount -u /mnt/windows

KNOWN ISSUES

Please see the README file for all the known issues. If you would find a new one in the latest release of this software then please send an email describing it to the development team:
linux-ntfs-dev@lists.sourceforge.net

AUTHORS

ntfs-3g is an improved ntfsmount which was originally written by Yura Pakhuchiy, with contributions from Yuval Fledel. The improvements were made by Szabolcs Szakacsits.

DEDICATION

With love to Marina Sapego.

THANKS

Many thanks to Miklos Szeredi for advice and answers about FUSE.

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 00:34:26 GMT, July 18, 2006