--------- about --------- Sandbox is a library (and helper utility) to run programs in a "sandboxed" environment. This is used as a QA measure to try and prevent applications from modifying files they should not. For example, in the Gentoo world we use it so we can build applications as root and make sure that the build system does not do crazy things outside of its build directory. Such as install files to the live root file system or modify config files on the fly. For people who are familiar with the Debian "fakeroot" project or the RPM based "InstallWatch", sandbox is in the same vein of projects. ---------- method ---------- The way sandbox works is that you prime a few environment variables (in order to control the sandbox's behavior) and then stick it into the LD_PRELOAD variable. Then when the ELF loader runs, it will first load the sandbox library. Whenever an applications makes a library call that we have wrapped, we'll check the arguments against the environment settings. Based on that, any access that is not permitted is logged and we return an error to the application. Any access that is permitted is of course forwarded along to the real C library.