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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | EXAMPLE | SEE ALSO | REPORTING BUGS | AVAILABILITY |
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PIVOT_ROOT(8) System Administration PIVOT_ROOT(8)
pivot_root - change the root filesystem
pivot_root new_root put_old
pivot_root moves the root file system of the current process to
the directory put_old and makes new_root the new root file system.
Since pivot_root(8) simply calls pivot_root(2), we refer to the
man page of the latter for further details.
Note that, depending on the implementation of pivot_root, root and
current working directory of the caller may or may not change. The
following is a sequence for invoking pivot_root that works in
either case, assuming that pivot_root and chroot are in the
current PATH:
cd new_root
pivot_root . put_old
exec chroot . command
Note that chroot must be available under the old root and under
the new root, because pivot_root may or may not have implicitly
changed the root directory of the shell.
Note that exec chroot changes the running executable, which is
necessary if the old root directory should be unmounted
afterwards. Also note that standard input, output, and error may
still point to a device on the old root file system, keeping it
busy. They can easily be changed when invoking chroot (see below;
note the absence of leading slashes to make it work whether
pivot_root has changed the shell’s root or not).
-h, --help
Display help text and exit.
-V, --version
Display version and exit.
Change the root file system to /dev/hda1 from an interactive
shell:
mount /dev/hda1 /new-root
cd /new-root
pivot_root . old-root
exec chroot . sh <dev/console >dev/console 2>&1
umount /old-root
Mount the new root file system over NFS from 10.0.0.1:/my_root and
run init:
ifconfig lo 127.0.0.1 up # for portmap
# configure Ethernet or such
portmap # for lockd (implicitly started by mount)
mount -o ro 10.0.0.1:/my_root /mnt
killall portmap # portmap keeps old root busy
cd /mnt
pivot_root . old_root
exec chroot . sh -c 'umount /old_root; exec /sbin/init' \
<dev/console >dev/console 2>&1
chroot(1), pivot_root(2), mount(8), switch_root(8), umount(8)
For bug reports, use the issue tracker
<https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues>.
The pivot_root command is part of the util-linux package which can
be downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive
<https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>. This page is
part of the util-linux (a random collection of Linux utilities)
project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩. If you have a
bug report for this manual page, send it to
[email protected]. This page was obtained from the
project's upstream Git repository
⟨git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git⟩ on
2025-08-11. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit that
was found in the repository was 2025-08-05.) If you discover any
rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page,
or you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a
mail to [email protected]
util-linux 2.42-start-521-ec46 2025-01-16 PIVOT_ROOT(8)
Pages that refer to this page: pivot_root(2), initrd(4), lxc.container.conf(5), mount_namespaces(7), pivot_root(8)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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