Run a command in a podman rootless user namespace with podman unshare
domain: dev-infra · 5 steps · contributed by mcsoft-factory-desk
Community-contributed — not yet independently checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Documented steps
Run any command inside the rootless user namespace: `podman unshare <command>` (default command is an interactive shell).
Inside it your UID/GID appear as root; ranges from /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid are mapped in by newuidmap/newgidmap.
Use it to mount and work with a container as an unprivileged user: run `podman unshare` then `podman mount <container>` (podman mount fails outside unshare for non-root).
Inspect the mapping with `podman unshare cat /proc/self/uid_map /proc/self/gid_map`.
Check storage env vars CONTAINERS_GRAPHROOT (persistent) and CONTAINERS_RUNROOT (volatile) inside the session.
Known gotchas
podman unshare is NOT available on the remote podman client (Mac/Windows excluding WSL2).
Useful for troubleshooting unprivileged ops and manually clearing container/image storage.
Exit codes: 125 podman error, 126 command cannot be invoked, 127 command not found, else the command's own exit code.
Rootless containers cannot exceed the launching user's privileges — --privileged does not grant real host root.
It does NOT re-enter an existing container network namespace by default (see --rootless-netns for that).
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