H. Peter Anvin June 13, 2004 User tools for zisofs: The user tools for zisofs come in two parts: a utility "mkzftree" and mkisofs, which is part of the cdrtools package. cdrtools 1.11a20 or later is required. First create a directory tree containing compressed files: mkzftree input_dir compressed_dir mkzftree will not overwrite an existing directory; you may want to "rm -rf" the directory tree if you are doing this from a script: Second, invoke the patched mkisofs with the -z option: mkisofs -z -R [other options] -o compressed.iso compressed_dir IMPORTANT: you *must* enable RockRidge (-R or -r) since this is an extensions to the RockRidge specification. Without RockRidge, -z will have no effect. Note that if there are files you do not want compressed (for example, files involved in booting, or README files you want to be readable under all circumstances) you can simply put them in a separate tree and not run mkzftree on that tree. mkzftree will not compress files that end up larger when compressed; if you want it to compress the files anyway, you can give the -f option to mkzftree. mkzftree also accepts a -u option (uncompress), which can be used to convert a compressed tree back to normal form. This can be used to read a zisofs CD-ROM on a machine without zisofs kernel support. This version of mkzftree supports a -p option (parallelize.) Specifying -p and a parallelism (e.g. -p4) allows files (up to the number specified) to compress in parallel. Depending on your setup and your data set size, this might speed things up if you are not completely I/O bound. Use -p0 to completely disable parallel execution; this is the default.