ISO is one of the types of archive file format. An ISO file is intended to be burned into an optical disk (CD/DVD). The distribution of Linux distros is the best example of how an ISO file is used.

Apart from burning to an optical disk, you can also see the contents contained on an ISO file by extracting it, just like other archive file formats like ZIP and TAR. In Linux, you can extract an ISO file using the default archive manager of the distro you use. Nearly all default archive managers on Linux have the capability to extract an ISO file.

What if you use a Linux distro which its default archive manager has no capability to extract an ISO file?. Or, you probably want to look geeky by using a command line-based tool instead of GUI-based one. Mountis the command line-based tool you can use to extract an ISO file on Linux. I will demonstrate how to use this tool to extract an ISO file. In this example, I am going to extract an ISO file of Ubuntu.

Firstly, create a new folder under the “/mnt” directory. Name your folder as you like. In this example, I name my folder “ubuntu”

sudo mkdir /mnt/ubuntu

Then, run the following command to start extracting. Be sure to replace “ubuntu-17.10-desktop-amd64” with the file name of the ISO file you want to extract.

sudo mount -o loop ubuntu-17.10-desktop-amd64.iso /mnt/ubuntu/

Be sure to run the command above from the folder where the ISO file you want to extract of is located. To access the extracted files, just visit the folder you have just created, which is located the “/mnt” folder.