I am mounting an ISO file, and looking at this tutorial. They use the command:
$ mount -o loop disk1.iso /mnt/disk
I'm trying to understand the use of -o loop
. I have two questions:
-
When I look at the long man page for mount, it takes time to find that
-o
option. If I doman mount | grep "-o"
I get an error, and when I look in the file I do not find any info that "loop" is a command text for option-o
. Where is that documented? -
Also, what is the "loop device" concept for mounting?
Best Answer
A loop device is a pseudo ("fake") device (actually just a file) that acts as a block-based device. You want to mount a file
disk1.iso
that will act as an entire filesystem, so you use loop.The
-o
is short for--options
.And the last thing, if you want to search for "-o" you need to escape the '-'.
Try: