How do you make an ISO image of a directory on Linux. For instance, if I have the directory /home/username/burnthis , and I want to burn everything inside of the burnthis directory, but not the burnthis directory itself, what command would I type in? Does this work for DVD ISO images as well as CD ISO images?

You're looking for the mkisofs command. In your situation, what I would normally do is this:
You'll get an ISO image named cdimage in the user's home directory, and it will use Joliet and RockRidge extensions (and no, the burnthis directory itself will not be included in the image).

As for whether it extends to DVDs... I honestly don't know, but I don't see why not. That's a technical-standard-based question, and I'm not sure where that documentation lives.

EDIT:
ilikejam is right... use the lowecase 'r' in the command... changed mine to reflect that.

Hi.

Run mkisofs on the directory. Here's what I use:
mkisofs -J -r -o <output.iso> <directory to be burned>

DVDs and data CDs are effectively the same (including video DVDs) ISO filesystem. There's a 2GB limit on the size of ISO images, though.

Dave

Edit: Having looked into iso-levels more, I've changed my mind about using level 3, so I'm using level 1(normal ISO9660) now.

Why are SUSE and Red Hat (Fedora) able to distribute ISO's larger than 2 GB then? Is there some kind of special way to do this?

Oops. I meant that to read 'a 2GB limit on the size of files in an ISO image'.

Dave

Ah, that should be fine. The biggest file will probably be 200 MB so it shouldn't be a problem. Thank you for all of the replies.

Cya!