Man page 8 : ntfsmount

ntfsmount - Read/Write userspace NTFS driver.

ntfsmount device mount_point [-o options]
mount -t fuse.ntfs device mount_point [-o options]

/etc/ftsab entry:
device mount_point fuse.ntfs options 0 0

ntfsmount is a read/write userspace NTFS filesystem driver. Technically it connects FUSE with libntfs.

• ntfsmount features:
       Create/Delete/Move files and directories.
  Hard link files.
  Read and write to normal and sparse files.
  Read compressed and encrypted files.
  Access to special Interix files (symlinks, devices, FIFOs).
  List/Read/Write/Add/Remove named data streams.
  Supports Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Mac OS X.

ntfsmount supports most of options that mount and FUSE accepts (see "man 8 mount" and FUSE documentation for them). Additionally ntfsmount have some unique to it options, below is a summary of them.

silent, nosilent

    silent option makes ntfsmount to do not return "Operation is not supported" error on chmod and chown operations (this option is on by default). nosilent cancels this.

• locale= value
      You can set locale with this option. It's useful if locale environment variables are not set before partitions from /etc/fstab had been mounted. Try submitting this option if you are experience problems with displaying national characters in filenames.
• \fBuid=value, \fBgid=value
      Set the owner and the group of files and directories. The values are numerical. The defaults are the uid and gid of the current process.
• \fBumask=value, \fBdmask=value, \fBfmask=value
      Set the bitmask of the file and directory permissions that are not present. The value is given in octal. Instead of specifying umask which applies both to files and directories, fmask applies only to files and dmask only to directories.

case_insensitive

    Make ntfsmount treat filenames in POSIX names as case insensitive. See FILENAME NAMESPACES section for details.

no_def_opts

    By default ntfsmount acts as some useful options were passed to it (you can get list of this options by running ntfsmount without any arguments). Submitting this option will cancel such behaviour.

noblkdev

    By default ntfsmount tries to mount block devices with blkdev FUSE option if it have enough privileges. Submit this option if blkdev mount does not work for you for some reasons.

force

    Force mount even if errors occurred. Use this option only if you know what are you doing and don't cry about data loss.

relatime, norelatime

    Update inode access times relative to modify or change time. Access time is only updated if the previous access time was earlier than the current modify or change time. (Similar to noatime, but doesn't break mutt or other applications that need to know if a file has been read since the last time it was modified.)

• streams_interface= value
      This option controls how the user can access named data streams. It can be set to, one of none, windows or xattr. See DATA STREAMS section for details.

debug

    Makes ntfsmount to not detach from terminal and print a lot of debug output from libntfs and FUSE.

no_detach

    Same as above but with less debug output.

There are exist several namespaces for filenames in NTFS: DOS, Win32 and POSIX. Names in DOS and Win32 namespaces are case insensitive, but names in POSIX namespace are case sensitive. By default windows creates filenames in DOS and Win32 namespaces (with exception for hard links), but ntfsmount always creates files in POSIX namespace. Note: you can create several files that differs only in case in one directory with ntfsmount, but windows applications may be confused by this.

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

By default or if "streams_interface=none" option was passed, ntfsmount will only read the unnamed data stream.

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

cat some.mp3:artist
rm some.mp3:album
echo Sympho Black Metal > some.mp3:genre
getfattr -n ntfs.streams.list some.mp3

If streams_interface option is set to xattr, then the named data streams are mapped to xattrs and user can manipulate them using getfattr and setfattr utilities. Eg.:

setfattr -n user.artist -v "Some Artist" some.mp3
getfattr -d some.mp3

Win32 does not allow characters like '<', '>', '*', '?' and so on in the filenames, but NTFS supports any characters except '\\0' (NULL) and '/'. You can create filenames with any allowed by NTFS characters using ntfsmount, but aware, you will not be able to access files with denied by Win32 characters from windows.

By default, files and directories are owned by the user and group of the mounting process and everybody has full read, write, execution and directory browsing permissions. If you want to use permissions handling then use the uid and/or the gid options together with the umask or fmask and dmask options.

Windows users have full access to the files created by ntfsmount.

Mount /dev/hda1 to /mnt/ntfs using ntfsmount submiting locale option:

ntfsmount /dev/hda1 /mnt/ntfs -o locale=be_BY.UTF-8

/etc/fstab entry for above:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/ntfs fuse.ntfs locale=be_BY.UTF-8 0 0

Umount /mnt/ntfs:

fusermount -u /mnt/ntfs

If you find a bug please send an email describing the problem to the development team:

ntfsmount was written by Yura Pakhuchiy, with contributions from Yuval Fledel and Szabolcs Szakacsits.

With love to Marina Sapego.

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

ntfsmount is part of the ntfsprogs package and is available from:
http://www.linux-ntfs.org/content/view/19/37

The manual pages are available online at:
http://man.linux-ntfs.org/

Additional up-to-date information can be found furthermore at:
http://wiki.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php?id=ntfsmount

Read libntfs(8) for details how to access encrypted files.

R libntfs (8),

R ntfsprogs (8),

R attr (5),

R getfattr (1)