I have a directory say for example /tmp/stuff, and I want to create an .img (stuff.img) file of this stuff directory. Can some one please help me to achieve this? Thanks

There are short cuts to this, but this is how I'd do it. #make sure the loop driver is installed modprobe loop #determine the amount of memory space I need cd dir_of_interest du cd dd if=/dev/zero of=new_img bs=1024 count=#kilobytes needed losetup /dev/loop0 new_img mkfs.ext3 /dev/loop0 mount /dev/loop0 /mnt cp -a dir_of_interest /mnt/ umount /mnt losetup -d /dev/loop0 Now you have the img of dir_of_interest.