Copyright (c) 1983 Regents of the University of California.
All rights reserved. The Berkeley software License Agreement
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@(#)chroot.2 6.3 (Berkeley) 08/26/85

C 5 chroot - change root directory

chroot(dirname)
char *dirname;

Dirname is the address of the pathname of a directory, terminated by a null byte. Chroot causes this directory to become the root directory, the starting point for path names beginning with ``/''.

In order for a directory to become the root directory a process must have execute (search) access to the directory.

This call is restricted to the super-user.

Upon successful completion, a value of 0 is returned. Otherwise, a value of -1 is returned and errno is set to indicate an error. Chroot will fail and the root directory will be unchanged if one or more of the following are true:

15 [ENOTDIR] A component of the path name is not a directory.

15 [EINVAL] The pathname contains a character with the high-order bit set.

15 [ENAMETOOLONG] A component of a pathname exceeded 255 characters, or an entire path name exceeded 1023 characters.

15 [ENOENT] The named directory does not exist.

15 [EACCES] Search permission is denied for any component of the path name.

15 [ELOOP] Too many symbolic links were encountered in translating the pathname.

15 [EFAULT] Path points outside the process's allocated address space.

15 [EIO] An I/O error occurred while reading from or writing to the file system.

chdir(2)