Details
Goals & objectives
Hardware & software
Solution overview
In this lab you learn where a Linux system keeps each kind of file, and how to tell a real file from one that only looks like it. You read the machine's hostname and its release from plain text settings under /etc and list its logs under /var/log. You find which program a command runs with which, install a small program of your own in /usr/local/bin, and see how the shell's PATH found it. Then you discover that /bin is only a link into /usr/bin, measure a /proc file that reports zero bytes but still has content, and write to a device that throws data away. You finish by finding which of the system's temporary directories is held in memory. Before each of these you predict the answer, then run the command to check it.