Going to an interview for junior UNIX position in a large company. I know basic UNIX (basic commands, navigation...

how does one get a tech job without going to school?

OP is fucked, go humiliate yourself

Practice all of these before going in, op.

You honestly don't have much time but they'll expand your knowledge vastly.. and get sleep.

great stuff thanks man. i dont plan on sleeping much today.

sorry i should've excluded Linux. I have heard of RedHat but never used it or had any practice with it.

Would also add this if you don't already know it.

CentOS is unbranded Redhat.

Redhat is similar to Debian (or Ubuntu) but uses yum (*.rpm packages) instead of dpkg (*.deb packages).

They all use systemd instead of init.d nowadays, so the differences are fairly minor.

Wouldn't hurt to learn some basic networking. Usually the point of setting up a *nix machine is to get it to talk to other things.

>tfw I can never really figure out whether I should make the target directory of cp first or if it will be created

I almost always get it wrong

Okay, how do you go to the directory ABOVE your current one, ie you went into the wrong directory and want to go back up without putting the entire path again?

cd -

or if it's really just up one level
cd ..

Probably makefiles, testing framework, debugging and git/version control. Ideally autotools but that's a fair bit.
Makefiles aren't too hard once you understand the process, testing framework depends on the language (catch for C++ is pretty cheap and cheerful, not sure about any others), nemiver is a good debugging that is really user friendly, and probably just setup an account on Github and make sure you understand the basics of it.
Linux is broad and deep as fuck, but as long as you can say you've done some stuff before, your employer won't have to worry about teaching you everything from the ground up.

What type of places should a newbie work at if they want to become a linux admin? (I have a linux essentials cert and am going to host my own website on digital ocean).
I've heard ISP, MSP, webhosting, datacenters, I know what those things are, is one better than the other, does it matter?

learn how to use awk, grep, and curl

Tell us how it goes user, and what the interview questions were. Good luck bro I hope you make it!

Regex

Is it hard to learn should I pick up a book on it?

Random questions we used to ask potential hires for Linux admin positions. Pretty good gauge of initial skill and familiarity:
How can I tell if a machine is listening on port 110?
How can I find who's currently logged into the machine?
How can I find the machine's current load average?
How can I find how much memory is in use?
The /var partition fills up. What tools can I use to find out what's using up all the space?
How can I schedule a script to run every hour on the hour?
How can I list all the files a process has open?
How can I find what IPs are assigned to this machine?
What would I type to save and exit the file I'm editing in vi?
How could I find out what groups a user is a member of?
How can I see the network routing table?
What directory would I look in to find system logs?
What directory would I look in to find configuration files?
How could I search a log file for a specific phrase?
How can I see the last time the system rebooted?
What might I use to download an ISO from a specific URL?
How might I tell if I can reach another machine on the network on a specific port?

It just takes practise really. Internet resources are fine

Here are 4 links, since Cred Forums won't let me post it:
pastebin.com/12Mt5RmW

>sorry i should've excluded Linux. I have heard of RedHat but never used it or had any practice with it.
Then that's where you start.

Spend tonight installing Fedora (opensourceish RedHat alpha version).

Look up that one-liner for finding inode usage and understand how every component of it works. That will give you a decent crash course in piping shit through linux utils.

literally install gentoo

beware, every time any version of this pic comes up people say it's outdated.

If it's not bait...

Entire POSIX 3 standard

cd .. moves up a level
cd - moves to wherever you were previously
cd with nothing after it moves to your home directory

Microsoft® PowerShell™

Can someone correct / update (where you see 3 question marked) answers in case of fault?

Random questions we used to ask potential hires for Linux admin positions. Pretty good gauge of initial skill and familiarity:

How can I tell if a machine is listening on port 110?
>netstat -na | grep "110"
How can I find who's currently logged into the machine?
>who
>w
How can I find the machine's current load average?
>top
>uptime
How can I find how much memory is in use?
>free
>top
The /var partition fills up. What tools can I use to find out what's using up all the space?
>???
How can I schedule a script to run every hour on the hour?
>By using crontab (see bellow)
>0 * * * * sh script.sh >/dev/null 2>&1
How can I list all the files a process has open?
>???
How can I find what IPs are assigned to this machine?
>ifconfig
What would I type to save and exit the file I'm editing in vi?
>:wq
>ZZ
How could I find out what groups a user is a member of?
>groups
How can I see the network routing table?
>netstat -r
What directory would I look in to find system logs?
>/var/log
What directory would I look in to find configuration files?
>/etc/
How could I search a log file for a specific phrase?
>cat | grep "phrase"
How can I see the last time the system rebooted?
>last reboot | less
What might I use to download an ISO from a specific URL?
>wget
>curl
How might I tell if I can reach another machine on the network on a specific port?
>telnet

sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /

Networking. 90% of your job will be about that shit.

CCENT level at least and related commands. If it have datacenters do some shit with cloud too and say you have seen fucking servers already.

learn how to search for simple patterns in GREP, maybe some basic regular expressions if you want to show off

know how to use cut to snip columns from CSV / by whitespace delimiters

| is your friend

Anyone??

>How can I list all the files a process has open?
lsof

Cheers!!

>The /var partition fills up. What tools can I use to find out what's using up all the space?
du -h | sort -h

These questions a pretty easy. Hope they ask the same

>cat abuse
Dont call us well call you.

mom: you're so quiet - what are you doing in there?

(you): I'm practising "ls", mom

Not him, is using cat a bad practice or what's wrong with it?

a single dot will refer to the folder in which you already are. it's useful if you, say, need to open the GUI file manager in a folder in which you already are in the terminal.

say, 'youtube-dl 'youtubevideo.com'; caja .'
meaning, after you finish downloading the video the folder will open itself.

it's noob stuff but it's nice.

cat is short for concatenation. If you are using it to "screen blast" a file then it is uncouth and wastes a process. He should have just used grep with file redirection. It's a small thing but it separates the Unix men from Linux weenies.

>It's a small thing but it separates the Unix men from Linux weenies.
Damn son, that just makes me feel bad.
Guess I'll need to work on my skills some more.

Gr8 b8 m8

How the fuck do you idiots like you get these interviews? Do you lie like a fucking child on your resume?

It's a junior position man. Everyone has to start somewhere. I'll happily hire someone to a jr role long as they have a solid grasp of the basics and the ability to learn. Sure they don't all work out but I've gotten some great people on board who started as jr admins and worked their way up.

Would love to see what he put on his resume. Junior positions aren't that easy to get if you don't understand basics.

Protip: There is a secret in the industry that the best Linux administrators are BSD administrators. Learn *BSD.

And why is that?

>how can i cat a list in reverse?
tac

Experience. BSD admins generally pay more attention to detail and are better at creating clean shell scripts and sane solutions.

How do you gain professional experience with BSD if every place requires you to have at least 3-5?

Nice meme.

wtf is a unix position?

But he's right. Linux wasn't taken seriously in the enterprise until the late 2000's meanwhile BSD and Solaris admins had been around since the mid 90's. BSD was already in places like Yahoo, hotmail...etc before the 2001 dot-com bubble burst.

Tell us how the interview went !

will do, 13hours till it

Yeah, I have heard this called 'unnecessary catting'. My brother still does it because he can't remember that the search goes before the filename with grep syntax so he finds it easier to cat a file and pipe it to grep.

just remember
grep blah file

Not OP, but I'd love a job similar to this. What are good places to search for this sort of position? One where they don't expect me to be an expert on everything, but where they'll appreciate that I know some GNU/Unix basics.

I've used GNU/Linux on all my personal computers for a few years. I've got a pretty good grasp of the command line and such. The biggest issue I have is that I can't program at all. Never even really written a bash script. I'm comfortable in vim, though.

oh and most importantly: a job where I won't have to work with Windows at all

Here is an advantage of using grep instead of abusing cat:
You can reference the file name, while by abusing cat everything is concatenated (because that's what cat does) to stdout (or stdin, depends how you're looking at it)

$ echo foo > one.txt
$ echo FOO > two.txt
$ echo bar > three.txt

$ grep -li foo *.txt
one.txt
two.txt

$ mkdir fizz
$ cp one.txt fizz/buzz.txt

$ find . -iname '*.txt' -exec grep -li foo {} \;
./one.txt
./fizz/buzz.txt
./two.txt

Telecom companies, ISPs, hosting providers would be my guess.
Next to *NIX systems you might also be exposed to some network stuff like Cisco, Juniper and other juicy non-microshaft tech.

You two are true Cred Forumsentlemen and scholars!
I salute you.

>I know basic UNIX (basic commands, navigation, permissions), what else should i learn in 24hrs?
How to fake logs, git commits etc. to point the blame at somebody else, because with your lack of UNIX experience you *will* fuck shit up.

Funny you mention ISPs and similar things. A friend of mine told me I should apply to his work once, but it's quite far away and I can't drive. I probably could've actually gotten a job there if I had a license and a car.

I guess maybe I should work on being able to drive first.

Are you me?
Have no drivers license too and missing great job opportunities because of this.
Feels bad bro.

And here's an example of what I like to call “unnecessary find”

If you want to do a recursive grep, use grep -R .

Alternatively, if the extension was important to you, you could have done grep **/*.txt

Systemd only really applies if they have actually migrated to rhel/centos 7 though.

In enterprise is systemd relevant? Or are they still using the older inits? I'm a novice and the only distros I've been using for learning have been systemd based.

To be relevant you need to learn upstart/systemd/BSD init/SysV init and Solaris SMF

... all of them? I have the Unix/linux sysadmins handbook, which covers some of those.

You wouldn't have to hit BSD init or Solaris SMF as hard as the others, but yes.

>They all use systemd instead of init.d nowadays, so the differences are fairly minor.
My biggest gripe with CentOS is the stupid /etc/sysconfig method of configuring network devices. It's hard to maintain and write compared to the debian family's /etc/network/interfaces

Another thing that anoys me about CentOS is their tendency to aggressively remove drivers for stuff like older network cards, which you then have to get from some third party repositority/package.

....

SSSHEEEEIIIIIITTTT.

Should i even care about general interview questions? Like riddles and shit?

Thank you user

awk, sed, grep

spotted this

youtube.com/watch?v=l0QGLMwR-lY

>netstat
deprecated for ss

Why would he do that? You're implying with his lack of experience he'd be able to outsmart the other sysadmins that he works with.

What kind of business is it? ISP Datacenter etc?

Here you go OP:

docdro.id/LyYAOaJ

Bump.

interview in 2hrs, a bit scared. will post results

good luck, bud

nice blog bro

>retards like this get job interviews
>meanwhile, I'm still a fucking NEET
why the fuck am I wasting my time ;_;

>grep blah file
less file
then /blah

also, grep -a for text files

I'm rootin for ya (cause im in the same boat)

Interview ended over and hour ago. will post how did it go if anyone is interested

Do tell.

You're not ready for that job at all.

Aww, did your mommy come up with that list for you

Basically you are going to be wanting how to use to the find command. And in particular, the -exec bit of it.

If, that's really where you want to be heading in life.

>How can I tell if a machine is listening on port 110?
If I'm on the machine: lsof -i :110
If I'm not: nmap -p 110 HOST

>How can I find who's currently logged into the machine?
who/w

>How can I find the machine's current load average?
uptime

>How can I find how much memory is in use?
(h)top, free -m

>The /var partition fills up. What tools can I use to find out what's using up all the space?
du --summarize --total --si /var/*

>How can I schedule a script to run every hour on the hour?
/etc/cron.hourly, systemd timers

>How can I list all the files a process has open?
lsof -p $(pgrep process)

>How can I find what IPs are assigned to this machine?
ip addr list, ifconfig

>What would I type to save and exit the file I'm editing in vi?
:x, :wq

>How could I find out what groups a user is a member of?
groups user, grep user /etc/group

>How can I see the network routing table?
route (-6) -n, ip route show

>What directory would I look in to find system logs?
journalctl -e, /var/log, /var/log/journal, etc. (depends)

>What directory would I look in to find configuration files?
/etc for well-behaved stuff, often crap goes into /opt/ or /var/www//config or whatever though

>How could I search a log file for a specific phrase?
grep phrase, less FILE + /phrase

>How can I see the last time the system rebooted?
journalctl -b, uptime

>What might I use to download an ISO from a specific URL?
wget, curl

>How might I tell if I can reach another machine on the network on a specific port?
nc, nmap

do I pass?