Ubuntu – the difference between chroot, dchroot and schroot

chroot

What is the difference between chroot, dchroot and schroot?

What do they have in common?

Where are the differences?

Which one is needed for what?

Best Answer

A chroot may be used directly as root by running chroot(8), but normal users are not able to use this command. schroot allows access to chroots for normal users using the same mechanism, but with permissions checking and allowing additional automated setup of the chroot environment, such as mounting additional filesystems and other configuration tasks. This automated setup is done through the action of setup scripts which may be customised and extended to perform any actions required.[1]

dchroot is basically an earlier version of the same thing, but its use is being (or has been) deprecated in favour of schroot.[2]

[1] http://linux.die.net/man/1/schroot
[2] http://linux.die.net/man/1/dchroot