e2tools

Introduction

E2tools is a simple set of GPL'ed utilities to read, write, and manipulate files in an ext2/ext3 filesystem. These utilities access a filesystem directly using the ext2fs library. I wrote these tools in order to copy files into a linux filesystem on a machine that does not have ext2 support. Of course, they can also be used on a linux machine to read/write to disk images or floppies without having to mount them or have root access.

Status

The following functions have been implemented and have been tested on Linux, SCO OpenServer 5, and AIX 4.3 (not extensively though).

• copy files: e2cp
• move files: e2mv
• remove files: e2rm
• create directory: e2mkdir
• create hard links: e2ln
• list files/directories: e2ls
• output the last part of a file: e2tail

To Do

• Improve user documentation. The README contains some basic usage examples now.
• Improve internal code documentation
• Implement other functions (mknod, test, etc.)
• Needs htree and extended attribute support & testing
• Automated test suite

.... some of the internal functions need to be cleaned up.

Requirements

• e2fsprogs It works with version 1.26 or later.
• gcc - some of the e2fsprog code will not compile with some proprietary compilers.

Download

• The most up to date source code can be found at https://github.com/e2tools/e2tools:

  git clone https://github.com/e2tools/e2tools.git
  

• The most recent release is e2tools-0.1.0 from 2020-02-07 by Christoph Gysin, Hans Ulrich Niedermann and others. We have a dist tarball e2tools-0.1.0.tar.gz available for you.
• The most recent release by original author Keith Sheffield is e2tools-0.0.16.tar.gz for a bug fixes. See the ChangeLog for details.