gvfs is a userspace virtual filesystem designed to work with the i/o abstractions of gio (a new library available with glib). It installs several modules that are automatically used by applications using the APIs of libgio. The gvfs model differs from e.g. gnome-vfs in that filesystems must be mounted before they are used. There is a central daemon (gvfsd) that handles coordinting mounts, and then each mount is (typically) in its own daemon process (although mounts can share daemon process). gvfs comes with a set of backends, including trash support, sftp, smb, http, dav and others. There is a set of command line programs starting with gvfs- that lets you run commands (like cat, ls, stat, etc) on files in the gvfs.

WWW: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/gvfs
