Fakeroot provides a fake "root environment" by means of LD_PRELOAD and SysV IPC (or TCP) trickery. It puts wrappers around getuid(), chown(), stat(), and other file-manipulation functions, so that unprivileged users can (for instance) populate .deb archives with root-owned files; various build tools use fakeroot for this by default.

This package contains fakeroot command and the daemon that remembers fake ownership/permissions of files manipulated by fakeroot processes.