How to extract .iso file on Solaris 10

Many software packages can be downloaded in the form of an ISO image. ISO images can also be created from CD and saved as ISO images:

$ cat /dev/somecd > somename.iso

Rather than burning the image to a CD-ROM to access its contents, it is easy to mount the image directly into the filesystem using the lofiadm and mount commands.

Given an ISO image in /export/temp/software.iso, a loopback file device (/dev/lofi/1) is created with the following command:

# lofiadm -a /export/temp/software.iso /dev/lofi/1

The lofi device creates a block device version of a file. This block device can be mounted to /mnt with the following command:

# mount -F hsfs -o ro /dev/lofi/1 /mnt

These commands can be combined into a single command:

# mount -F hsfs -o ro `lofiadm -a /export/temp/software.iso` /mnt

Other ISO images can be mounted by incrementing the lofi device:

# lofiadm -a /export/temp/software2.iso /dev/lofi/2
# lofiadm -a /export/temp/software3.iso /dev/lofi/3
etc.