Acronym for Compact Disc - Read Only Memory (see DiskVsDisc)
Standard discs hold 650MB or there abouts. The normal filesystem used on a CDROM data track is ISO9660. Hence the common use of "ISO" to refer to disc images and of the extension .iso for their filename.
Images can be created using mkisofs(8) and inspected using isoinfo(8) or isodump(8). Alternatively, you can mount an ISO like a regular device using the Kernel's loopback support (but note that this requires SuperUser privileges):
mount /path/to/image.iso /mnt/iso -o loop
There are two competing standards to allow longer filenames and a few other things ISO9660 does not provide. The earlier one, originating from the Unix environment, is called Rock Ridge. The other one, made up my MicrosoftCorporation, is called Joliet. (Note that some characters that are valid on Unix FileSystems are not allowed on Joliet discs.)
For reading audio discs or writing CDs, you need access to the CDROM drive raw device. Under a Linux OperatingSystem, these are called /dev/hdx for IDE drives and /dev/scdn for SCSI drives. Under FreeBSD 5 and later, they're called /dev/acdn for IDE drives and ??? (AddToMe) for SCSI drives.
See also:
26 pages link to CDROM:
