Book Image

Learn Linux Quickly

By : Ahmed AlKabary
Book Image

Learn Linux Quickly

By: Ahmed AlKabary

Overview of this book

Linux is one of the most sought-after skills in the IT industry, with jobs involving Linux being increasingly in demand. Linux is by far the most popular operating system deployed in both public and private clouds; it is the processing power behind the majority of IoT and embedded devices. Do you use a mobile device that runs on Android? Even Android is a Linux distribution. This Linux book is a practical guide that lets you explore the power of the Linux command-line interface. Starting with the history of Linux, you'll quickly progress to the Linux filesystem hierarchy and learn a variety of basic Linux commands. You'll then understand how to make use of the extensive Linux documentation and help tools. The book shows you how to manage users and groups and takes you through the process of installing and managing software on Linux systems. As you advance, you'll discover how you can interact with Linux processes and troubleshoot network problems before learning the art of writing bash scripts and automating administrative tasks with Cron jobs. In addition to this, you'll get to create your own Linux commands and analyze various disk management techniques. By the end of this book, you'll have gained the Linux skills required to become an efficient Linux system administrator and be able to manage and work productively on Linux systems.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)

Where is your hard disk?

To know which file represents your hard disk; you need to run the command lsblk, which is short for list block:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 20G 0 disk
| sda1 8:1 0 20G 0 part /
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom

From the output, I can see that the name of my hard disk device is sda, which is short for SCSI Disk A. Now you need to understand that depending on the type of your hard disk drive, you may get a different name. Figure 1 summarizes Linux naming strategies for different types of hard drives:

Figure 1: Hard disk naming in Linux

So from the output of the lsblk command, you can conclude that I only have one disk (sda) on my virtual machine. Now we don't want to play with this disk as it contains the root filesystem, so let's add another disk to our virtual machine for learning purposes.