ISOINFO(1)

ISOINFO(1) 💿✨

okay so bestie, welcome to the isoinfo page from the General Commands Manual — and it's literally a whole squad of utilities: devdump, isoinfo, isovfy, and isodump. They all live together and they're all about dumping and verifying iso9660 images. The whole vibe is "crude but useful" and honestly? We love that for them 💅 Let's get into it.

---

🌸 NAME 🌸

devdump, isoinfo, isovfy, isodump — utility programs for dumping and verifying iso9660 images.

---

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

devdump isoimage

isodump isoimage

isoinfo [ -d ] [ -h ] [ -R ] [ -J ] [ -j charset ] [ -f ] [ -l ] [ -p ]
[ -T sector ] [ -N sector ] [ -i isoimage ] [ -x path ]

isovfy isoimage

---

🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

So here's the tea on each of these little guys, one by one:

devdump is a crude utility that lets you interactively display the contents of device or filesystem images. When it opens, the initial screen shows you the first 256 bytes of the first 2048-byte sector. The commands you use are exactly the same as with isodump.

isodump is a crude utility that lets you interactively display the contents of iso9660 images, specifically so you can verify directory integrity. The initial screen shows the first part of the root directory, and the prompt tells you the extent number and the offset within that extent. Super handy, lowkey iconic.

Here are the commands you get: - You can use the 'a' and 'b' commands to move backwards and forwards within the image. - The 'g' command lets you goto an arbitrary extent. - The 'f' command specifies a search string to be used. - The '+' command searches forward for the next instance of that search string. - The 'q' command exits devdump or isodump.

isoinfo is a utility that performs directory-like listings of iso9660 images. It's giving "ls but make it iso9660" and it's honestly the most user-friendly one of the bunch — more on that in a sec.

isovfy is a utility that verifies the integrity of an iso9660 image. Fun fact: most of the tests in isovfy were added after bugs were discovered in early versions of genisoimage. Is it still clear how useful this is anymore? Not really! But does it hurt to have it around? Also no. So it stays 💖

---

✨ OPTIONS ✨

The options that all the programs share are -help, -h, -version, i=name, and dev=name. Then the isoinfo program has a bunch of additional command-line options. Here they all are, bestie:

• -help — (this one's in the common squad, see the list below for what the regular -h does)
• -h — print a summary of all options.
• -d — print information from the primary volume descriptor (PVD) of the iso9660 image. This includes the deets on Rock Ridge, Joliet extensions, and Eltorito boot information if present.
• -f — generate output as if a 'find . -print' command had been run on the iso9660 image. Important: you should not use the -l image with the -f option.
• -i iso_image — specifies the path of the iso9660 image that we wish to examine. Note that the options -i and dev=target are mutual exclusive (they can't sit together, it's giving messy).
• dev=target — sets the SCSI target for the drive, see the notes above. A typical device specification looks like dev=6,0. If a filename must be provided together with the numerical target specification, that filename is implementation specific — you can find the correct filename in the system-specific manuals of the target operating system. On a FreeBSD system without CAM support, you need to use the control device (e.g. /dev/rcd0.ctl). A correct device specification in that case may be dev=/dev/rcd0.ctl:@.
  • On Linux, drives connected to a parallel port adapter are mapped to a virtual SCSI bus. Different adapters get mapped to different targets on this virtual SCSI bus.
  • If no dev option is present, the program will try to get the device from the CDR_DEVICE environment.
  • If the argument to the dev= option does not contain the characters ',', '/', '@', or ':', it is interpreted as a label name that may be found in the file /etc/wodim.conf (see the FILES section).
  • The options -i and dev=target are mutual exclusive. (Yes, we said it twice, it's that serious.)
• -l — generate output as if a 'ls -lR' command had been run on the iso9660 image. Important: you should not use the -f image with the -l option.
• -N sector — a quick hack to help examine single-session disc files that are to be written to a multi-session disc. The sector number specified is the sector number at which the iso9660 image should be written when sent to the cd-writer. Not used for the first session on the disc.
• -p — print path table information.
• -R — extract information from Rock Ridge extensions (if present) for permissions, file names, and ownerships.
• -J — extract information from Joliet extensions (if present) for file names.
• -j charset — convert Joliet file names (if present) to the supplied charset. See genisoimage(8) for the details.
• -T sector — a quick hack to help examine multi-session images that have already been burned to a multi-session disc. The sector number specified is the sector number for the start of the session we wish to display.
• -x pathname — extract the specified file to stdout.

---

👑 AUTHOR 👑

The author of the original sources (1993 ... 1998) is Eric Youngdale <ericy@gnu.ai.mit.edu> or <eric@andante.jic.com> — and yes, he is to blame for these shoddy hacks 😭. Joerg Schilling wrote the SCSI transport library and its adaptation layer to the programs, plus the newer parts (starting from 1999) of the utilities — which makes them Copyright (C) 1999-2004 Joerg Schilling. Patches to improve general usability would be gladly accepted 🫶.

This manpage describes the program implementation of isoinfo as shipped by the cdrkit distribution. See http://alioth.debian.org/projects/debburn/ for the details. It's a spinoff from the original program distributed in the cdrtools package [1]. But fr, the cdrtools developers are not involved in the development of this spinoff and therefore shall not be made responsible for any problem caused by it. And please — do not try to get support for this program by contacting the original author(s). They don't wanna hear it 🙈.

If you have support questions, send them to:

debburn-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org

If you have definitely found a bug, send a mail to this list or to:

submit@bugs.debian.org

...and make sure you write at least a short description into the Subject and put Package: cdrkit into the first line of the mail body. That's the vibe check for getting help 💅.

---

💀 BUGS 💀

The user interface really sucks. That's it. That's the whole section. No notes 😭

---

🌈 FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS 🌈

These utilities are really quick hacks, which are actually super useful for debugging problems in genisoimage or in an iso9660 filesystem. In the long run, it would be nice to have a daemon that would NFS export an iso9660 image. Iconic dream, honestly.

The isoinfo program is probably the program that is of the most use to the general user. Main character energy for real 👑.

---

⭐ AVAILABILITY ⭐

These utilities come with the cdrkit package, and the primary download site is http://debburn.alioth.debian.org/ plus FTP mirrors of distributions. Despite the name, the software is not beta — so don't come for it 🫶.

---

💜 ENVIRONMENT 💜

• CDR_DEVICE — this may either hold a device identifier that is suitable to the open call of the SCSI transport library, or a label in the file /etc/wodim.conf.
• RSH — if the RSH environment variable is present, the remote connection will not be created via rcmd(3) but by calling the program pointed to by RSH. Use e.g. RSH=/usr/bin/ssh to create a secure shell connection.
  • Note that this forces the program to create a pipe to the rsh(1) program and disallows the program from directly accessing the network socket to the remote server. This makes it impossible to set up performance parameters and slows down the connection compared to a root-initiated rcmd(3) connection.
• RSCSI — if the RSCSI environment variable is present, the remote SCSI server will not be the program /opt/schily/sbin/rscsi but the program pointed to by RSCSI. Note that the remote SCSI server program name will be ignored if you log in using an account that has been created with a remote SCSI server program as login shell.

---

🍓 FILES 🍓

• /etc/wodim.conf — default values can be set for the following options in /etc/wodim.conf.
  • CDR_DEVICE — this may either hold a device identifier that is suitable to the open call of the SCSI transport library, or a label in the file /etc/wodim.conf that allows you to identify a specific drive on the system.
  • Any other label — is an identifier for a specific drive on the system. Such an identifier may not contain the characters ',', '/', '@', or ':'.
    • Each line that follows a label contains a TAB-separated list of items. Currently, four items are recognized: the SCSI ID of the drive, the default speed that should be used for this drive, the default FIFO size that should be used for this drive, and drive-specific options. The values for speed and fifosize may be set to -1 to tell the program to use the global defaults. The value for driveropts may be set to "" if no driveropts are used. A typical line may look like this:

teac1= 0,5,0   4    8m   ""

yamaha= 1,6,0  -1   -1   burnfree

• This tells the program that a drive named teac1 is at scsibus 0, target 5, lun 0 and should be used with speed 4 and a FIFO size of 8 MB. A second drive may be found at scsibus 1, target 6, lun 0 and uses the default speed and the default FIFO size. Slay 🎀

---

🧚 SEE ALSO 🧚

genisoimage(1), wodim(1), readcd(1), ssh(1).

---

🌸 SOURCES 🌸

[1] Cdrtools 2.01.01a08 from May 2006, http://cdrecord.berlios.de

---

okay bestie that's the whole page! This was literally Version 2.0, dated 04/06/01, and it's the ISOINFO(1) manual page — periodt. Go forth and dump some iso9660 images responsibly 💖✨🎀