An ISO file is an archive of an optical media. We can mount ISO files in the same way that we mount physical disks using loopback mounting.

We can even use a nonempty directory as the mount path. Then, the mount path will contain data from the devices rather than the original contents, until the device is unmounted. Consider this example:

    # mkdir /mnt/iso
    # mount -o loop linux.iso /mnt/iso

Now, perform operations using files from /mnt/iso. ISO is a read-only filesystem.