switch_root(8) — Linux manual page

SWITCH_ROOT(8)            System Administration           SWITCH_ROOT(8)

NAME

       switch_root - switch to another filesystem as the root of the
       mount tree

SYNOPSIS

       switch_root [-hV]

       switch_root newroot init [arg...]

DESCRIPTION

       switch_root moves already mounted /proc, /dev, /sys and /run to
       newroot and makes newroot the new root filesystem and starts init
       process.

       WARNING: switch_root removes recursively all files and
       directories on the current root filesystem.

OPTIONS

       -h, --help
           Display help text and exit.

       -V, --version
           Print version and exit.

EXIT STATUS

       switch_root returns 1 on failure, it never returns on success.

NOTES

       switch_root will fail to function if newroot is not the root of a
       mount. If you want to switch root into a directory that does not
       meet this requirement then you can first use a bind-mounting
       trick to turn any directory into a mount point:

           mount --bind $DIR $DIR

AUTHORS

       Peter Jones <pjones@redhat.com>, Jeremy Katz <katzj@redhat.com>,
       Karel Zak <kzak@redhat.com>

SEE ALSO

       chroot(2), init(8), mkinitrd(8), mount(8)

REPORTING BUGS

       For bug reports, use the issue tracker at
       https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues.

AVAILABILITY

       The switch_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
       util-linux@vger.kernel.org. This page was obtained from the
       project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git⟩ on
       2024-06-14. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit
       that was found in the repository was 2024-06-10.) 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 man-pages@man7.org

util-linux 2.39.594-1e0ad      2023-07-19                 SWITCH_ROOT(8)

Pages that refer to this page: chroot(2), pivot_root(2), namespaces(7), pid_namespaces(7), pivot_root(8)

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