Jaroslav Sykora posted a series of five patches to handle the kernel portion of what he described as "shadow directories", providing an example which utilized FUSE to access the contents of a compressed file from the command line. His first example was cat hello.zip^/hello.c about which he explained, "the '^' is an escape character and it tells the computer to treat the file as a directory. The kernel patch implements only a redirection of the request to another directory('shadow directory') where a FUSE server must be mounted. The decompression of archives is entirely handled in the user space. More info can be found in the documentation patch in the series."

There were numerous problems suggested. Jan Engelhardt noted, "too bad, since ^ is a valid character in a *file*name. Everything is, with the exception of '\0' and '/'. At the end of the day, there are no control characters you could use." Later in the thread an lwn.net article from a couple years ago was quoted, "another branch, led by Al Viro, worries about the locking considerations of this whole scheme. Linux, like most Unix systems, has never allowed hard links to directories for a number of reasons;" The article had been discussing Reiser4, which treats files as directories. In the current discussion, Al Viro added, "as for the posted patch, AFAICS it's FUBAR in handling of .. in such directories. Moreover, how are you going to keep that shadow tree in sync with the main one if somebody starts doing renames in the latter? Or mount --move, or..."