Boot cd

[Tim]

Tim wrote:
>> Why do people do this?  Faced with instructions that say how to burn a
>> disc from ISOs, or having to find said instructions, they go looking for
>> something else to unpack the image file.

Mike McCarty:
> Well, use of language like this is part of what causes the confusion.
> One does not "unpack" an ISO, because an ISO is not a "packed file".
> It is a file system. One can mount it, but not "unpack" or "extract".
> These words should properly only be used with .tar, .arc, .zip, .rar,
> .lzh, .gz, etc. files. Not with .iso.

Well to be really pedantic, unpacking doesn't *have* to refer to
compressed archives.  You unpack contents of a box, don't you?  You take
things out of the container.  That's all that an ISO is, a container of
files with a structure to it.  And an "archive" doesn't have to be
compressed, it's just a collection of files; in that regards it's not
all that different from tar files.

The word "extract" isn't all that different either.  It's an odd word to
use in the context of retrieving a file from some container, too.  But
still isn't solely associable with getting something out of a compressed
archive.

And taking a rather obtuse, but not totally incorrect point of view; if
I make an ISO file of a CD-ROM, to back up somewhere else, I *have*
"archived" it.  I might well want to extract one file from an ISO, and I
have actually done that on one or two occasions.

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