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Is there any technique or tool that makes it possible to have everything but home directories moved to /linux-5.10 for example and still have the system behaving like if chrooted into that directory?

ls /
/linux-5.10 /root /home
which ls
/linux-5.10/usr/bin/ls

Have you ever seen anything like that? What should I research to know how to do it or understand why it is not possible?

EDIT: I'm just curious if a different skeleton on the rootfs is at all possible, I mean, would it be just a matter of having my package manager to prefix everything upon installation, adjust the $PATH etc or that's impossible because there are binaries that will go nuts if /proc is mounted somewhere else for example.

cvsguimaraes
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  • I am not sure what you need, and even less *why* you need this. But if your /home is a separate fs mounted on /home [of fs /], then you could maybe : just "mount again" underneath /linux-5.10 : all the others fs you will need there, but not the home fs itself, and then chroot to /linux-5.10 ? – Olivier Dulac Feb 01 '21 at 03:55
  • you should edit a bit your question to make it clearer : you seem to show regular ls with no chrooting going on (as you can see: /linux-5.10 underneath /) but it somehow uses the ls found underneath /linux-5.10/usr/bin ? : because you added that path first in $PATH ?) – Olivier Dulac Feb 01 '21 at 03:56
  • @OlivierDulac Thanks for the comment. Well, _need_ is a strong word, for now I'm just curious if a different skeleton on the rootfs is at all possible, I mean, would it be just a matter of having my package manager to prefix everything upon installation, adjust the $PATH etc or that's impossible because there are binaries that will go nuts if `/proc` is mounted somewhere else for example. Hope that clears up my question a little bit. – cvsguimaraes Feb 01 '21 at 04:15
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    @kbtz "just a matter" :D No, you'd likely have to build those packages again with the prefix in mind. – muru Feb 01 '21 at 05:13
  • @muru Thanks for linking that question, with the right terminology in hands I can continue my research. Perhaps the easiest "distro" to tweak these is LFS? Thanks again! – cvsguimaraes Feb 01 '21 at 05:28
  • If we knew why, then we may be able to give better answers. As is the answer is "Yes, but…" – ctrl-alt-delor Feb 01 '21 at 07:30
  • @ctrl-alt-delor GoboLinux is kinda of overkill but in the right direction of what I wanted. Single bin,lib,... directories with FHS compatible links hidden by GoboHide kernel patch will pretty much achieve the cleaner structure that I wanted to use in my dailydriver – cvsguimaraes Feb 01 '21 at 12:23
  • Interesting I just read about gobohide. I am worried about the unintended consequences (e.g. what would be the result from `du` (or similar tools). However the out put of these tools on the root is not to useful anyway. But maybe there are other unintended consequences.) And what is this I hear that only `root` user can get the list of hidden directories. – ctrl-alt-delor Feb 01 '21 at 16:52
  • @ctrl-alt-delor yeah I gotta see it to believe it, I'll try to use their patch and see what caveats I find – cvsguimaraes Feb 01 '21 at 18:30

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