In this particular case dd did not accomplish what I wanted & mkisofs is for ISO's which doesn't encapsulate all cases. Dd also has a particular drawback in that running it incorrectly can wipe your entire hard drive...oops I guess... Linux is like this everywhere- rough & poorly designed from an end user standpoint. In no world should I be using, or even able, to run a command so freely which could f up my system without not only elevated permissions but also confirmation of the very bad thing I'm about to do. That conceptsfollows into package managers with a dozen random dependencies to download or setup some utility you are likely downloading to solve some other problem. Like I said, linux suffers from a poor end user experience & that is their biggest failing...next to the absurd file system standard- thankfully some distros are moving away to something more sane but that will likely be ten plus years before it sees better adoption. Linix should have focused on the desktop environment long ago & as a community stopped looking at distributions as 'a hundred ways to do the same thing' to instead focus on a more cohesive operating system. I could go on but that's enough, they just don't have a great vision & their claims of server OS dominance mostly have to do with it being free more then anything else.