Web Architecture, Management and Marketing

There’s a great little command line utility that I use on my laptop (OS X) whenever I need to burn an ISO disk image to a disk. Last night I grabbed the MythDora ISO to try out on an old box and today I went to burn it. Problem is, I always forget the name of the program that helps me burn. Knowing that when I search for “burn iso osx” in google it’ll come up as the first result does not help me remember.

First off, here’s the osx iso burning trick:

hdiutil burn image.iso

The only thing that I ever change with this command is the name of the disk image. So I should make an alias to this command with something that I’ll remember. To make an alias in OSX or FreeBSD open up your command line preferences file. In OSX my personal command line preferences file is at ~/.profile (that ~ stands for my home directory). So open up a terminal and type:

edit .profile

This should open up your personal .profile file in your favorite editor. Or if you don’t have a .profile file yet, a new one will be made for you. I’ve decided that the alias “burniso” would be much easier to remember than hdiutil. And with an alias, I can also include the “burn” switch that goes along with hdiutil. So, at the end of my .profile, I add:

alias burniso="hdiutil burn"

Now anytime I type the command “burniso”, my computer interprets that as “hdiutil burn”.

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