Short: Create iso9660 filesystem + Rock Ridge. V1.10 Author: eric@andante.jic.com (Eric Youngdale) Type: dev/ade Version: 1.10 Architecture: m68k-amigaos Origin: Amiga Development Environment, ftp.ninemoons.com:pub/ade Mkisofs is effectively a pre-mastering program to generate an iso9660 filesystem. It takes a snapshot of a given directory tree, and generates a binary image which will correspond to an iso9660 filesystem when written to a block device. Mkisofs is also capable of generating the System Use Sharing Protocol records 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 longer filenames, uid/gid, posix permissions, and block and character devices. Each file written to the iso9660 filesystem must have a filename in the 8.3 format (8 characters, period, 3 characters, all upper case), even if Rock Ridge is in use. This filename is used on systems that are not able to make use of the Rock Ridge extensions (such as MS-DOS), and each filename in each directory must be different from the other filenames in the same directory. Mkisofs generally tries to form correct names by forcing the unix filename to upper case and truncating as required, but often times this yields unsatisfactory results when there are cases where the truncated names are not all unique. Mkisofs assigns weightings to each filename, and if two names that are otherwise the same are found the name with the lower priority is renamed to have a 3 digit number as an extension (where the number is guaranteed to be unique). An example of this would be the files foo.bar and foo.bar.~1~ - the file foo.bar.~1~ would be written as FOO.000;1 and the file foo.bar would be written as FOO.BAR;1 Note that mkisofs is not designed to communicate with the writer directly. Most writers have proprietary command sets which vary from one manufacturer to another, and you need a specialized tool to actually burn the disk. The cdwrite utility is one such tool that runs under Linux and performs this task. The latest version of cdwrite is capable of communicating with Phillips/IMS/Kodak, HP and Yamaha drives. Most writers come with some version of DOS software that allows a direct image copy of an iso9660 image to the writer. The current version of cdwrite is available from sunsite.unc.edu: /utils/disk-management/cdwrite-2.0.tar.gz Also you should know that most cd writers are very particular about timing. Once you start to burn a disc, you cannot let their buffer empty before you are done, or you will end up with a corrupt disc. Thus it is critical that you be able to maintain an uninterrupted data stream to the writer for the entire time that the disc is being written.