The Node

Posts Tagged ‘files’

On your Internet travels, you may have come across CD image files with a .bin or .cue extension. You might even hypothetically want to mount these files under Linux and read their contents. It’s very easy once you know how and here is how you do it.

The utility that makes this possible is called bchunk. Your friendly Linux software repository will no doubt have it. For Red Hat-based systems this means running: -

yum install bchunk

and for Debian-based systems, this means running: -

sudo apt-get install bchunk

BIN and CUE files are extensively used as CD file image formats in burning software under Windows but is less supported on other platforms where the now more common ISO file format is used. The difference between the two is largely irrelevant to this topic but suffice to say the entirety consists of the BIN file which holds the actual data and a text CUE file which acts as an index of the data. To convert the files to ISO, simply run: -

bchunk yourfile.bin yourfile.cue yourfile.iso

…where the first parameter is the BIN file, the second is it’s corresponding CUE file and the last is the output ISO file.

For mounting this resulting ISO file on to your Linux file-system, create a mount point directory for it and run: -

mount -o loop -t iso9660 yourfile.iso /mnt/yourmountpoint

That’s it! Simple but useful.