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. -- Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
