Mkisofs is effectively a pre-mastering program to generate an iso9660
filesystem.  It takes a snapshot of a given directory tree, and generates a
binary image which will correspond to an iso9660 filesystem when written to
a block device.

Mkisofs is also capable of generating the System Use Sharing Protocol
records specified by the Rock Ridge Interchange Protocol.  This is used to
further describe the files in the iso9660 filesystem to a unix host, and
provides information such as longer filenames, uid/gid, posix permissions,
and block and character devices.

Each file written to the iso9660 filesystem must have a filename in the 8.3
format (8 characters, period, 3 characters, all upper case), even if Rock
Ridge is in use.  This filename is used on systems that are not able to make
use of the Rock Ridge extensions (such as MS-DOS), and each filename in each
directory must be different from the other filenames in the same directory.

Mkisofs generally tries to form correct names by forcing the unix filename
to upper case and truncating as required, but often times this yields
unsatisfactory results when there are cases where the truncated names are
not all unique.

Mkisofs assigns weightings to each filename, and if two names that are
otherwise the same are found the name with the lower priority is renamed to
have a 3 digit number as an extension (where the number is guaranteed to be
unique).  An example of this would be the files foo.bar and foo.bar.~1~ -
the file foo.bar.~1~ would be written as FOO.000;1 and the file foo.bar
would be written as FOO.BAR;1

Note that mkisofs is not designed to communicate with the writer directly.
Most writers have proprietary command sets which vary from one manufacturer
to another, and you need a specialized tool to actually burn the disk.  The
cdwrite utility is one such tool that runs under Linux and performs this
task.  The latest version of cdwrite is capable of communicating with
Phillips/IMS/Kodak, HP and Yamaha drives.  Most writers come with some
version of DOS software that allows a direct image copy of an iso9660 image
to the writer.  The current version of cdwrite is available from
sunsite.unc.edu: /utils/disk-management/cdwrite-2.0.tar.gz

Also you should know that most cd writers are very particular about timing.
Once you start to burn a disc, you cannot let their buffer empty before you
are done, or you will end up with a corrupt disc.  Thus it is critical that
you be able to maintain an uninterrupted data stream to the writer for the
entire time that the disc is being written.

 PERMSSN    UID  GID    PACKED    SIZE  RATIO     CRC       STAMP          NAME
---------- ----------- ------- ------- ------ ---------- ------------ -------------
-rw-rw-r-- 20025/200     33954   81920  41.4% -lh5- d0f2 Mar 30  1998 mkisofs-1.10-bin.tar
---------- ----------- ------- ------- ------ ---------- ------------ -------------
 Total         1 file    33954   81920  41.4%            Mar 16  1998