The chroot utility causes command to be executed relative to newroot. The meaning of any initial slashes (|) in the path names is changed to newroot for command and any of its child processes. Upon execution, the initial working directory is newroot.

Notice that redirecting the output of command to a file,

chroot newroot command >x

will create the file x relative to the original root of command, not the new one.

The new root path name is always relative to the current root. Even if a chroot is currently in effect, the newroot argument is relative to the current root of the running process.

This command can be run only by the super-user.

The exit status of chroot is the return value of command.

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

cd(1), tar(1), chroot(2), ttyname(3C), attributes(5)

Exercise extreme caution when referencing device files in the new root file system.

References by routines such as ttyname(3C) to stdin, stdout, and stderr will find that the device associated with the file descriptor is unknown after chroot is run.