Translation(s): English - Français - Italiano


genisoimage and xorrisofs

The classical command line interface for production of ISO 9660 filesystem images is the option set established by program mkisofs. For reasons of licensing and other problems with its author, Debian ships a fork of mkisofs, called genisoimage, which was split off in 2006 and then developed independently.

Meanwhile, genisoimage gets no new features and not even bug fixes. It is first choice only if its options -udf or -hfs are needed.

Replacement in most uses cases, especially for bootable ISO 9660 filesystems, archiving, and backup, is xorrisofs which starts the -as mkisofs emulation mode of program xorriso.

Creating an ISO 9660 CD-ROM filesystem image

Examples of the task to create an ISO 9660 filesystem image and to burn it to CD, DVD, or BD are presented on the BurnCd page.

The options of the first example

genisoimage -v -J -r -V MY_DISK_LABEL -o /home/user/file.iso /home/user/for_iso
xorrisofs -v -J -r -V MY_DISK_LABEL -o /home/user/file.iso /home/user/for_iso

mean in particular:

More than one input path may be given. In this case it is best to use option -graft-points and pathspecs of the form target=source.

See Also