When you have an disk image file (either from a CD or a floppy disk), you can directly mount it as a file system instead of writing (burning) it back to disk before using it. The best usage of this is when you don't have CD burner (CD-R or CD-RW), but do need to read (or view) into the image files distributed over the internet.
Suppose an image file myimage.iso under current directory:
mount -o loop -t iso9660 myimage.iso <mounting point>The mounting point is any empty available directory such as /home/kong/disk1, the value following -t can also be auto, or msdos. One can also explicitly assign values to loop (i.e. -o loop [=/dev/loop1~n],[blocksize=1024]).
The simple way:
mount myimage.iso <mounting point> -o loopOmitting values for 'loop=...' will automatically assign available loop device to the image file.