Constructing CD-ROM images

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

Apologies for this only marginally laptop-related post. (In my humble
defense, I'm trying to backup my laptop now that it's working very
nicely, so it is laptop related...for me :-)

Does anyone know of a tool that will let me say, roughly, "here's a
list of files that I want on my CD-R, and I want them in exactly this
directory layout"?

The only pre-mastering tool I've used is mkisofs, but it insists that
any list of files specified on the command line (or with the
-path-list option) are destined for the root.

In other words, if I say:

  mkisofs [opts] /path1/file1 /path1/file2 /path2/file1

it creates an image with

  /file1
  /file2
  /file1-with-mangled-name

but that's not what I want, I want:

  /path1/file1
  /path1/file2
  /path2/file1

Making a physical copy of the tree that I want to build isn't really
an option (I've got disk space, but not necessarily that much :-). And
using a symlink farm isn't really an option because some of the files
in that list are already symlinks and I don't want them flattened.

(You can see what I've done, right? I've written a little perl script
that fairly intelligently figures out what files need to be backed up
and how they should be laid out to fit on a CD-R, but now I need to
translate that list of pathnames into an actual CD-R image.)

My workaround is to make tar files and write those to CD (which does have
the nice benefit that I can bzip2 them and fit even more on the CDs),
but sequential reads of a tar file to find files to restore is tedious.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | There is a great difference between
http://nwalsh.com/            | seeking how to raise a laugh from
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                              | Shaftesbury