%general-entities; ]> From now on, all commands in the rest of the book will be run as the root user. Currently, the /tools directory, /cross-tools directory, and $LFS directory are owned by the user lfs, a user that exists only on the host system. For security reasons, the $LFS root directory and all of it subdirectories should be owned by root. Change the ownership for $LFS and its subdirectories by running these commands: chown 0:0 ${LFS} chown -R 0:0 $LFS/{bin,boot,dev,etc,home,lib,media,mnt,opt,proc,root,sbin,srv,sys,tmp,usr,var} Optionally, you can do the same with /tools and /cross-tools. Although these directories can be deleted once the LFS system has been finished, they can be retained to build additional LFS systems. If the /tools and /cross-tools directories are kept as is, the files are owned by a user ID without a corresponding account. This is dangerous because a user account created later could get this same user ID and would own the /tools and /cross-tools directories and all the files therein, thus exposing these files to possible malicious manipulation. To avoid this issue, add the lfs user to the new LFS system later when creating the /etc/passwd file, taking care to assign it the same user and group IDs as on the host system. Alternatively, assign the contents of the /tools and /cross-tools directories to user root by running the following command: chown -R 0:0 /tools chown -R 0:0 /cross-tools This book assumes you ran these chown commands.