2 - Essentials of System Administration

Unit 2 - Essentials of System Administration

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Essential Unix commands

Question 1: ls

Enter the number of entries in the top level directory. 

Question 2: Edit

Edit the file /etc/motd so that it contains the single word Welcome.

Question 3: uid

Give the uid of the user called "operator".

Question 4: owner

Who is the owner of the directory /var/cache/httpd? If you get no information, are you sure you are using "ls" to give the directory information or the contents of the directory instead?

Question 5: permissions

Give the name of the first directory (alphabetically) of / that has no read permission for other.

Question 6: more permissions

Change the permission of the directory /var/log/httpd so that group and world have execute and read permission.

Question 7: Change owner

Change the owner of the file /etc/ntp.conf to operator

Question 8: Drop zone

Create a directory /root/dropzone It should be set up so that group and other users can save files in the directory, but they cannot read the files that are there. User root must able to read and write the directory.

Question 9: Linking files

Create a symbolic link so that the file /usr/share/dict/words appears as /root/words

Question 10: Word puzzle 1

Use grep on words to find a word that contains each of the vowels in the correct order. How many such words are there? (you may include words with extra vowels such as adventitious. /root/words

Question 11: Word puzzle 2

The word minglingly includes the same four characters (e.g. ingl) repeated. How many such words are there which also begin with lower case "m" (any four character are repeated).

Question 12: How much space...?

Look in /usr/share/doc and find a directory starting "git-" followed by a version number. In the following questions this directory is referred to as the "git" directory...


How much space is being used by the git directory? Use a command to calculate this, and dont try adding it up yourself! We want the total answer in human readable format (eg 6.2M).

Question 13: How much space is available?

In human readable form (eg 123M) how much disk space is available on the main filesystem?

Question 14: How much space is available?

Remove the entire git directory (it is not used in our tutorials). Now repeat the above calculation for disk space, but this time give the answer in blocks.