Right now the /stage1 directory is owned by the lfs user. However, this user account exists only on the host system. Although you may delete the /stage1 directory once you have finished your LFS system, you might want to keep it around, e.g. for building more LFS systems. But if you keep the /stage1 directory you will end up with files owned by a user id without a corresponding account. This is dangerous because a user account created later could get this user id and would suddenly own the /stage1 directory and all of the files therein. This could open the /stage1 directory to manipulation by an untrusted user. To avoid this issue, you can 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 id. Alternatively, you can (and the book will assume you do) run the following command now, to assign the contents of the /stage1 directory to user root by running the following command: chown -R 0:0 /stage1 The command uses "0:0" instead of "root:root", because chown is unable to resolve the name "root" until glibc has been installed.