% podman-unshare(1)
podman-unshare - Run a command inside of a modified user namespace
podman unshare [options] [--] [command]
Launches a process (by default, $SHELL) in a new user namespace. The user
namespace is configured so that the invoking user's UID and primary GID appear
to be UID 0 and GID 0, respectively. Any ranges which match that user and
group in /etc/subuid
and /etc/subgid
are also mapped in as themselves with the
help of the newuidmap(1) and newgidmap(1) helpers.
podman unshare is useful for troubleshooting unprivileged operations and for manually clearing storage and other data related to images and containers.
It is also useful if you want to use the podman mount command. If an unprivileged user wants to mount and work with a container, then they need to execute podman unshare. Executing podman mount fails for unprivileged users unless the user is running inside a podman unshare session.
The unshare session defines two environment variables:
- CONTAINERS_GRAPHROOT: the path to the persistent container's data.
- CONTAINERS_RUNROOT: the path to the volatile container's data.
$ podman unshare id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root),65534(nobody)
$ podman unshare cat /proc/self/uid_map /proc/self/gid_map
0 1000 1
1 10000 65536
0 1000 1
1 10000 65536
podman(1), podman-mount(1), namespaces(7), newuidmap(1), newgidmap(1), user_namespaces(7)