On Thu, 27 Aug 2015 at 13:08 Trent W. Buck <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:

fakeroot(1) can do this, I think.
LD_PRELOAD is one of the available strategies.

fakeroot doesn't intercept open():

brian@prune:~$ fakeroot touch /etc/newfile touch: cannot touch ‘/etc/newfile’: Permission denied
brian@prune:~$