Before you can access the files on the CD-ROM, it has to be mounted onto your UNIX filesystem. You may need root access on your machine to do this.
On some platforms, the CD-ROM will be mounted automatically when you place it in the drive. On most, however, you will have to run a mounting program to mount it. You may also have to create a directory on your machine to serve as the mount point. (The mount point is the point in your filesystem at which the CD-ROM directory structure will be found.)
When you have mounted the CD-ROM and can see the
tar
files on your UNIX filesystem, you are ready to unpack them. Once you are finished with the
tar
files on the CD-ROM, you can remove it from your drive, but only after you have performed an "unmount" operation.
When unmounting it is necessary that no process has the CD-ROM mount point as the current directory, and again, root access is necessary. Pushing the eject button on the drive may not do anything until the volume has been unmounted.
The basic syntax of the mounting and unmounting operations on each supported platform is given in each of the platform-specific sections below.