Programs for the root filesystem

Now, it is time to start populating the root filesystem with the essential programs and the supporting libraries, configuration, and data files that it needs to operate, beginning with an overview of the types of program you will need.

The init program

You have seen in the previous chapter that init is the first program to be run and so has PID 1. It runs as the root user and so has maximum access to system resources. Usually, it runs shell scripts which start daemons: a daemon is a program that runs in the background with no connection to a terminal, in other places it would be called a server program.

Shell

We need a shell to run scripts and to give us a command-line prompt so that we can interact with the system. ...

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