chroot(1)

πŸ“¦
version 0.7.0 Β· 2 versions
, in epel 10, fedora 43, fedora 44

✨ chroot β€” the manual page but make it make sense ✨

okay so bestie, this is chroot(1) from the General Commands Manual section of the manual pages, and honestly? it's giving "tiny command, huge power". we're running a command but pretending the filesystem root is somewhere else entirely. iconic behavior. πŸ’…


🌸 NAME 🌸

chroot β€” run COMMAND with the root directory set to NEWROOT.

like literally that's the whole thing. it's a one-trick pony and the trick is changing where / lives. πŸ¦‹


πŸŽ€ SYNOPSIS πŸŽ€

chroot [--groups] [--userspec] [--skip-chdir] [-h|--help] [-V|--version]
<newroot> [command]

so the vibe is: you give it a newroot, you optionally give it a command, and then there's a lil pile of flags up top doing their thing. the [--groups] and [--userspec] in that synopsis line are the short forms β€” the actual arguments they eat are in OPTIONS below, keep reading bestie πŸ’–


πŸ’« DESCRIPTION πŸ’«

Run COMMAND with root directory set to NEWROOT.

that's it. that's the description. the manpage really said "no notes, no elaboration". 😭 but fr fr, that one sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting β€” everything cool and everything scary about this command lives in those ten words. ✨


πŸ‘‘ OPTIONS πŸ‘‘

  • --groups <GROUP1,GROUP2...> β€” a comma-separated list of groups to switch to. yes, commas, not spaces, not vibes. πŸ“
  • --userspec <USER:GROUP> β€” colon-separated user and group to switch to. that's one colon in the middle, user on the left, group on the right. iykyk.
  • --skip-chdir β€” use this option to not change the working directory to / after changing the root directory to newroot, i.e., inside the chroot. so normally you get yeeted to / inside your new little world, and this flag says "no thank you, leave me where i am". 🧚
  • -h, --help β€” print help. always a safe first move, no cap. 🫢
  • -V, --version β€” print version. the "who even am i" button. πŸ’€

⭐ VERSION ⭐

v(uutils coreutils) 0.7.0

yup, that's the version string, exactly like that, parentheses and all. do not come for me, i don't make the rules. πŸ™ˆ


heads up bestie: this page is short but chroot is not a "just try it and see" command. messing with the root directory is a big deal β€” read the options, double check your newroot, and don't be reckless. main character energy, yes. main character mistakes, no. πŸ’œ

and that's the whole page, periodt. πŸ’… this little gem comes from uutils coreutils 0.7.0, sitting pretty in the General Commands Manual, and it signs off as chroot (uutils coreutils) 0.7.0 on the chroot(1) page. slay, go chroot responsibly. 🌈✨

πŸ“¦ where this page comes from
  • epel 10: rust-coreutils-devel 0.7.0-10.el10_3 Β· MIT
  • epel 10: uutils-coreutils 0.7.0-10.el10_3 Β· (MIT OR Apache-2.0) AND Unicode-DFS-2016 AND Zlib AND (0BSD OR MIT OR Apache-2.0) AND Apache-2.0 AND (Apache-2.0 OR Apache-2.0 WITH LLVM-exception) AND (Apache-2.0 OR GPL-2.0-only) AND (Apache-2.0 WITH LLVM-exception OR Apache-2.0 OR MIT) AND BSD-2-Clause AND (BSD-2-Clause OR Apache-2.0 OR MIT) AND BSD-3-Clause AND CC0-1.0 AND ISC AND MIT AND (MIT OR Zlib OR Apache-2.0) AND (MIT-0 OR Apache-2.0) AND Unicode-3.0 AND (Unlicense OR MIT)
  • fedora 43: rust-coreutils-devel 0.7.0-12.fc43 Β· MIT
  • fedora 43: uutils-coreutils 0.7.0-12.fc43 Β· (MIT OR Apache-2.0) AND Unicode-DFS-2016 AND Zlib AND (0BSD OR MIT OR Apache-2.0) AND Apache-2.0 AND (Apache-2.0 OR Apache-2.0 WITH LLVM-exception) AND (Apache-2.0 OR GPL-2.0-only) AND (Apache-2.0 WITH LLVM-exception OR Apache-2.0 OR MIT) AND BSD-2-Clause AND (BSD-2-Clause OR Apache-2.0 OR MIT) AND BSD-3-Clause AND CC0-1.0 AND ISC AND MIT AND (MIT OR Zlib OR Apache-2.0) AND (MIT-0 OR Apache-2.0) AND Unicode-3.0 AND (Unlicense OR MIT)
  • fedora 44: rust-coreutils-devel 0.7.0-4.fc44 Β· MIT
  • fedora 44: uutils-coreutils 0.7.0-4.fc44 Β· (MIT OR Apache-2.0) AND Unicode-DFS-2016 AND Zlib AND (0BSD OR MIT OR Apache-2.0) AND Apache-2.0 AND (Apache-2.0 OR Apache-2.0 WITH LLVM-exception) AND (Apache-2.0 OR GPL-2.0-only) AND (Apache-2.0 WITH LLVM-exception OR Apache-2.0 OR MIT) AND BSD-2-Clause AND (BSD-2-Clause OR Apache-2.0 OR MIT) AND BSD-3-Clause AND CC0-1.0 AND ISC AND MIT AND (MIT OR Zlib OR Apache-2.0) AND (MIT-0 OR Apache-2.0) AND Unicode-3.0 AND (Unlicense OR MIT)
  • πŸ’– girlified by deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash on : a language model's rewrite of the original, under its terms