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.