Fundamentals of Unix and Linux System Administration

Learn to use the man pages (manual) to find help for Linux commands, system calls, and configuration files, navigate with space and ctrl-f, and search by keyword or topic.

Master yum plugins for faster mirrors, security updates, and delta rpm, and discover package discovery with provides, group installs, and cache cleanup for efficient Linux administration.

Learn to use sort, unique, wc, head, tail, and grep to process text in shell scripts, pipe outputs, and monitor logs with tail -f.

Explore Perl as a full programming language designed for scripting within Unix and Linux, comparing it to Bash and other languages, and learn basics like scalars, arrays, semicolons, and comments.

Learn how Perl handles script arguments, using @ARGV and $0, counting args with $#ARGV, and applying for, foreach, and while loops with eq/ne operators.

Explore startup daemons and run levels, revealing how scripts configure services at boot, then trace the boot process from BIOS and bootloader to kernel loading with Grub, including multi-boot scenarios.

Master using sudo to run commands as root, explore password prompts and no-exit protections, and audit sudo activity with system logs for accountability.

Explore how real id, effective id, and supplementary groups determine a user's access and file permissions via the primary group, and how cpu time and nice value govern process priority.

Explore the /proc virtual file system to view a running process's files and descriptors, including redirects to logs, then use estrace to trace its system calls for troubleshooting.

Explore Linux file systems, how the kernel abstracts them, and how to mount and unmount devices while navigating absolute and relative paths with proper space handling.

Explore how uid and gid identify users and groups, and how passwd maps ids to names. Learn about home directories, startup files, and using finger for user details.

Learn to add a disk to a Linux system by creating a partition with fdisk, forming a physical volume, and creating a volume group and a logical volume.

Partition disks to divide space into primary and extended partitions, create separate file systems for root, home, var, and temp, and configure swap across multiple disks for performance and reliability.

Explore how raid manages data across multiple disks to provide protection and performance, covering raid levels 0, 1, 0+1, 5, 6, parity, mirroring, striping, and hot spares.