fakeroot

tool for simulating superuser privileges

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.

pseudo

advanced tool for simulating superuser privileges

The pseudo utility offers a way to run commands in a virtualized "root" environment, allowing ordinary users to run commands which give the illusion of creating device nodes, changing file ownership, and otherwise doing things necessary for creating distribution packages or filesystems. 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.