Understanding /etc/passwd, /etc/group, /etc/sudoers, and /etc/skel/

Posted on March 13th, 2008 in Basics, Linux+ by admin

I decided to write this as a subsection of Root, Superuser, and User Management Basics as that was getting rather lengthy. There is a bit more to understand about managing users, groups, and super-user permissions. We’ve already covered how to add a user, delete a user, add a group, delete a group, rename a group, and how to reset a user’s password. Now what we didn’t go into depth was, all of this information is controlled by a number of files and these commands modify these files. These files can be manually editted though to accomplish the same thing or for more detailed management.

Viewing system information in the Commandline

Posted on March 5th, 2008 in Basics by admin

Source

GNU/Linux is bursting with information about the system on which it runs. The system’s hardware and memory, its Internet link and current processes, the latest activity of each user — all this information and more is available. And, despite such desktop tools as the KDE Control Center or GNOME’s System Monitor, the easiest place to get all the system information available is still the command line.

 

In many cases, you can view system information via specific commands. Some of these commands are written specifically to give information, while other commands that are mainly intended to alter the system in some way just happen to include parameters for viewing the current state of the system.

In other cases, you can view system information through log or configuration files or the /proc virtual filesystem. Many such files are written in plain text, so all that you need to view them are basic commands that output a file’s content to the command line, such as cat, less, or more.