Unix Admin

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Unix System Administrator Questions

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Unix

  • What's the latest version of the Linux kernel?
  • Can you tell me how you would make a directory group writable? how would you rm a file that starts with a minus.
  • Filesystem is full, but no large files seem to be present. What do you do? What could it be?
  • What's the system.map file?
  • Could you write a cd command in the programming language of yoru choice ?
  • What does the fork() system call return?
  • explain the steps between sending an e-mail and it being received.
  • What language do you generally use for scripting;
    • shell: Do you know what the "shift" command does? What variable contains the return value? of the last process?
    • Perl: Can you explain what tainting is? Can you explain what the -w command line argument does?
    • Python: Can you explain what a dictionary is?
  • A command is going haywire, can you describe the steps you would take to diagnose the problem? How would you collate information useful for forming a detailed bug report?
  • What is IRQ balancing, how would you do it? What does 64-bit computing really mean?
  • What is the difference between Maildir and mbox? Advantages of Maildir?
  • Customer has 10Gb /var, 5Gb /usr and wants to swap the two without losing any data. Explain the steps required to do so.
  • Give me the basic commands for an SMTP session.
  • Explain why the ``From: header in a standard e-mail is essentially useless for tracking an email. What should you be looking at?