Creating an ISO image from a CD/DVD on Unix

Hey, it has been a while since I last posted anything. I apologize to some of you since this post is going to be rather techie/geekie. It is more as a reminder to myself about how to do this than anything else.

Earlier today, I was furiously trying to find a utility on Linux to take a CD/DVD and create an ISO image from it. I was coming up dry and was feeling a bit frustrated until I stumbled onto this website. Once I read it I felt like a complete moron. Why did I feel so stupid? One of the great things about Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and pretty much every other OS descended from Unix is that everything is a file. Literally everything. And I had forgotten that disc drives (including optical drives) fall well within the category of “everything”.

Thus the way to create an ISO image from a CD/DVD is as simple as running the following from the terminal:

cat /dev/cdrom > /home/user/path/to/image.iso

That’s it. Simply redirect the output of CD/DVD device into a file. Easy, right?

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