Mount iso -o loop select loop device

Question

I have a bash script where I mount an ISO to loop devices:

mount -o loop my.iso /tmp/foo

And it happens that at the same time in my OS (Linux Mint 19) I have an ISO image mounted, using the GUI option for this action.

So I get the error

mount: /tmp/foo: /dev/loop0 ya está montado o el punto de montaje está ocupado.

(...loop0 mount point busy...)

Question:

Can I select what loop can I mount my ISO, something like:

mount - loop3 my.iso /tmp/foo

so I don't need to umount the previous ISO?

Answer 1

The error is not because you already have another ISO device mounted; the mount -o loop will always get the first unused loop device or create a new one.

And it's not because the same ISO image / loop device is already mounted on another directory -- the same device can be mounted on different mount points at the same time.

What you're probably trying to do is mount the same ISO on the same mount point twice. The mount(8) utility will try to guard you against that by checking if the backing file is already attached to a loop device and reusing that device, instead of attaching the same file to multiple loop devices.

But if you really want to do that, you can bypass the check by attaching the loop device by hand with losetup:

# mount -o ro a.iso dir/

# mount -o ro a.iso dir/
mount: /tmp/a.iso is already mounted

# losetup --show -f a.iso
/dev/loop1
# mount -o ro /dev/loop1 dir/
# 

The two combined:

# dev=$(losetup --show -f a.iso) && { mount -o ro "$dev" dir/ || losetup -d "$dev"; }

You should then use the -d option of umount(8) explicitly, or detach the the loop by hand afterwards, with losetup -d:

# umount -d dir/

That should be pretty safe with read-only filesystems, like ISOs. Don't ever use it with filesystems mounted in read-write mode.