How to create a bootable Linux installation USB from an ISO in OS X?

You have to Convert the ISO to UDRW format using:

hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o destination_file.img source_file.iso

for Further steps and reference click this link,

go with the steps: Create bootable USB stick from ISO in Mac OS X

dd should be done to the device of=/dev/disk1 instead of the partition of=/dev/disk1s1

As the comment above states (from cnst), UDRW appears to be Apple/mac/OSX proprietary. I had to convert to "UDTO - DVD/CD-R master for export" to make the USB bootable on other machines. When dd is finished in this case OSX (Mavericks) complains that it cannot read the disk/USB in this format which kinda confirms it. Also, unetbootin for OSX does not work either.

All of the instructions all over the internet blogsphere and even official linux documentation say to use UDRW and are not clear about specifically creating bootable USB for MAC.

So there are dozens of sites out there with instructions to create bootable linux USB drive on OSX. All I did was replace UDRW with UDTO on the hdiutil command and it worked:

hdiutil convert -format UDTO -o destination_file.img source_file.iso