Mounting ISO files as loopback

An ISO file is an archive of an optical media. We can mount ISO files in the same way that we mount physical disks using loopback mounting.

We can even use a nonempty directory as the mount path. Then, the mount path will contain data from the devices rather than the original contents, until the device is unmounted. Consider this example:

    # mkdir /mnt/iso
    # mount -o loop linux.iso /mnt/iso

Now, perform operations using files from /mnt/iso. ISO is a read-only filesystem.