Make an ISO from a Folder with mkisofs

Make an ISO from a Folder with mkisofs

You will run into a problem when trying to use mkisofs in centos 6, as it is not available in the repo's. It is packaged under genisoimage, genisoimage is a pre-mastering program to generate ISO9660/Joliet/HFS hybrid filesystems.

genisoimage is capable of generating the System Use Sharing Protocol records (SUSP) specified by the Rock Ridge Interchange Protocol. This is used to further describe the files in the ISO9660 filesystem to a Unix host, and provides information such as long filenames, UID/GID, POSIX permissions, symbolic links, and block and character device files.

Lets install mkisofs/genisoimage

genisoimage is available in the default CentOS repo's

yum install genisoimage

Creating an Image from a Directory

Lets create an iso from the /var/www directory. This way we can burn the iso to cd later.

mkisofs -r -o ~/webdirectory.iso /var/www/

Now you will have an iso called webdirectory.iso in your home directory.

I have found this useful when working with a virtual machine that does not allow me to setup nfs, but I can mount an iso. So I create an iso of the files I want to share with the virtual box and mount the iso in the cd-rom drive.