When building software it can be necessary to perform operations as if you were the system administrator. For example, you might need to define a file’s ownership or permission information.

Pseudo is a program that can either be used directly or as an LD_PRELOAD, which allows these operations to succeed as if the user did have system administrator privileges even though they are an ordinary user.

Pseudo has a lot of similarities to fakeroot but is a new implementation that improves on the problems seen using fakeroot. Pseudo is now extensively used by Poky as a replacement to fakeroot but can also be used standalone in many other use cases.