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.