Mounting an ISO image on Solaris
Many software packages can be downloaded in the form of an ISO image. ISO images can also be created from CD and saved as ISO images:
$ cat /dev/somecd > somename.iso
Rather than burning the image to a CD-ROM to access its contents, it is easy to mount the image directly into the filesystem using the lofiadm and mount commands.
Given an ISO image in /export/temp/software.iso, a loopback file device (/dev/lofi/1) is created with the following command:
# lofiadm -a /export/temp/software.iso /dev/lofi/1
The lofi device creates a block device version of a file. This block device can be mounted to /mnt with the following command:
# mount -F hsfs -o ro /dev/lofi/1 /mnt
These commands can be combined into a single command:
# mount -F hsfs -o ro `lofiadm -a /export/temp/software.iso` /mnt
Other ISO images can be mounted by incrementing the lofi device:
# lofiadm -a /export/temp/software2.iso /dev/lofi/2
# lofiadm -a /export/temp/software3.iso /dev/lofi/3
etc.
As a final step, unmount and detach the images:
# lofiadm
Block Device File
/dev/lofi/1 /files0/oracle/bmc_soft/99943.iso
# umount /mnt
# lofiadm -d /dev/lofi/1
# lofiadm
Block Device File