Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

How it works...

First we had to create a file to make a loopback filesystem. For this, we used dd, which is a generic command for copying raw data. It copies data from the file specified in the if parameter to the file specified in the of parameter. We instruct dd to copy data in blocks of size 1 GB and copy one such block, creating a 1 GB file. The /dev/zero file is a special file, which will always return 0 when you read from it.

We used the mkfts.ext4 command to create an ext4 filesystem in the file. A filesystem is needed on any device that can be mounted. Common filesystems include ext4, ext3, and vfat.

The mount command attaches the loopback file to a mountpoint (/mnt/loopback in this case). A mountpoint makes it possible for users ...