Miklos Szeredi posted a patch to allow files to be accessed as directories, offering the example of accessing the contents of a compressed tarball as you would any other directory. He noted that this is not the only application of the patch, "others might suggest accessing streams, resource forks or extended attributes through such an interface. However this patch only deals with the non-directory case, so directories would be excluded from that interface. But otherwise this patch doesn't limit the uses of the 'file as directory' concept in any way. It just adds the infrastructure to support these whacky beasts." Al Viro took an interest in the patch noting, "I'll look through the patch tonight; it sounds interesting, assuming that we don't run into serious crap with locking and revalidation logics." This was followed by an interesting discussion between Miklos and Al regarding the implementation of the patch.

Miklos went on to explain how the functionality works using mounts with special properties, "if a non-directory object is accessed with a trailing slash, then the filesystem may opt to let the file be accessed as a directory. In this case 'something' (as supplied by the filesystem) is mounted on top of the non-directory object." He then explained the following special properties of these mounts: "If there's no trailing slash after the file name, the mount won't be followed, even if the path resolution would otherwise follow mounts; The mount only stays there while it is referenced by some external object, like a pwd or an open file. When it is no longer referenced, it is automatically unmounted; Unlike 'real' mounts, this won't block unlink(2) or rename(2) on the underlying object."