I have some CD-RW discs, and I bought them with the intention of using them as standard "removable media"--i.e. I would like to be able to use them much like USB hard drive or floppy diskette. When I've got a document saved on a CD-RW, I'd like to be able to update and save it as the same file name--not save a different file each time I want to save. I'd also like to copy files back and forth to the CD using the standard "cp" command or a graphical interface like Nautilus.

Well, unfortunately, while I've been able to bring up a wealth of information on CD-burning (i.e. writing perminately to a disc), I haven't had much finding information on using a CD-RW in a manner that I have described. While I know I can use programs like cdrecord, Nautilus and K3B to permenantly burn files to a CD-RW, that (at least to me) really defeats the purpose of buying CD-RWs. I have even successfully used Nautilus to burn files to a CD-RW, but there's nothing "RW" about it when I can't even delete the files that went to the CD.

Incidentally, Windows isn't much better at this than Linux; even with XP, you have an intermediate "Burn these files to a CD" step where all of the files must be written to a temporary directory on the hard drive and then burned as an image to the CD.

Am I just missing something obvious here or is what I'm trying to do simply not the intent of CD-RWs?

Thanks for any helpful info!

The way I understand it, when using a CD-RW, as you write and re-write data, the disc slowly fills up, then you need to re-format (or blank) the disc and you can write data again.
I notice this not only on a computer, but on my digital camera (sony cd-mavica). If I take a full disc worth of photos and delete half of them, the disc still shows up as being full, until I re-formate the disc (after archiving the photos I wish to keep obviously).

with that said, you can 'blank' a CD-RW disc in Linux. I don't remember off the top of my head what the command line input is, but I use XCDRoast and it has the same utility built in. It's about as easy as click a button and you have a nice clean CD to write to.

All those who know more than I do on this feel free to elaborate or correct me.

superbondbond,

Thanks for the reply!

I see what you're saying. If that's really how it works, I guess I can see how they get away with calling it "re-writable".

I will say, however, that I have been able to get a CD-RW to behave just like any other disc in Windows using software called DirectCD. As long as this software is running on a Windows machine, you can treat a CD-RW disc just like it was another hard drive in Windows, and you could access it using any program. Of course, that's third-party software that doesn't come with Windows, so it's probably apples-and-oranges. I wonder if Linux has support that is similar to DirectCD?

Also, speaking of DirectCD, I believe that the name of the filesystem that DirectCD uses is called UDF (correct me if I'm wrong). I know I remember seeing an option in the kernel a long time ago for UDF support. I'm curious to know if it provides support for writing CD-RWs.

I too used Direct-CD back in my Windows days. I have to admit it was nice.

That program (and the others like it) uses UDF packet-writing, which is still in the early stages of development in the Linux kernel. When re-configuring my kernel I've encountered a selection for UDF writing support, but it's flagged as "dangerous"

Fear not, for I'm sure the in the future Linux will have more support for UDF.

If you're interested, you might be able to find out more about it with a quick Google search