Making ISO Files and Burning CD's

Need to create an ISO image of some directory contents and burn it to a CD or DVD? Here's how I do it on Fedora/RHEL/CentOS.

In (overly) simplistic script form, the making of an ISO9660 image goes like this.

#!/bin/bash
contents="path/to/files"
isodir="path/to/empty/dir"
isoimage="my-image.iso"

mkdir $isodir
cp -a $contents $isodir

mkisofs -R -J -T \
    -V "VOLUME_ID" \
    -A "Description of the contents" \
    -publisher "The Company, Inc" \
    -p "Another Company, Inc" \
    -o $isoimage $isodir

The Rock Ridge protocol (-R) and Joliet fileystem (-J) options specify extensions to the ISO9660 standard that help with OS compatibility. Rock Ridge adds POSIX file capabilites for Unix-compatible systems, and Joliet improves Windows compatibility.

The -T option adds a translation table to each directory, which further enhances compatibility on both Windows and Linux systems.

The remaining options are fairly obvious.  The volume ID (-V) can be up to 32 characters.  You might want to avoid whitespace for easier use on Unix systems, but it's not a requirement.

The other strings for application ID (-A), publisher, preparer (-p), are descriptive strings that can be up to 128 characters.

If you don't specify an output file or device (-o), the output will be written to stdout.

If you choose to write to a file, you can use cdrecord (a symlink to wodim on newer versions of Linux) to burn a CD.  You'll need to know the name of the device file for the optical writer on your system.  It's usually /dev/cdrom, /dev/dvdwriter, or something similar.

The command I use to burn CD's and DVD's is

cdrecord dev=/dev/cdrom my-image.iso.