mkisofs - burning long filenames to CD in linux

oh yeah, I got that gentoo box up, at least to a command promt.

Now for something I learned the hard way.

If you wanna burn CDs from a command prompt in Linux, you gotta use a command called mkisofs. Unfortunately, it is not obvious how to go about it. On top of that, the default filenames burned to cd get clipped to 8.3 format, as if you are running DOS 3.0!

So here is what worked for me. No promises it will work for you.

mkisofs -allow-multidot -allow-lowercase -l -relaxed-filenames -o {target.iso} {source dir}

Example: You wanna burn the /home/fred directory to a fred.iso image for burning.

mkisofs -allow-multidot -allow-lowercase -l -relaxed-filenames -o fred.iso /home/fred

Then after that, you gotta burn that .iso to CD. On my box (your will probably have a different value for the dev=), it is:

cdrecord -eject dev=0,0,0 fred.iso

That would burn the fred.iso to a blank CD, and eject it when done. That CD, when loaded up in another linux box, would have the proper long filenames. At least it does for me.