In Linux, you have multiple tools that can help you find the absolute path for files and directories in your system. Today, you’ll learn about those tools from basic to advanced, including their pros and cons to help you easily distinguish between them and decide
The find command is an advanced tool for searching files or directories rigorously in your file system, taking a little longer time than its alternative tools like the locate command. It’s due to its nature of searching a specified file by walking through each file
The locate command is used to quickly search for files or directories within the indexes in the database file known as updatedb. It is identical to the find command, except it will search in the database file, which is much faster than find’s method of
The whereis command is used to find the paths of binary, source, and manual files for a specified command, similarly to the find command but consuming less memory. Tutorial Details Description Whereis Difficulty Level Low Root or Sudo Privileges No OS Compatibility Ubuntu, Manjaro, Fedora,
The whatis command is used to fetch a one-line description of the specified command from the manual pages. The search query (command) you will use as an argument to get the description will be looked up in the index database maintained by the “maindb” program.
The which command locates the executable command or file location in the user’s environmental path. It will give you the complete path of executable command or file pointing towards in your file system. Tutorial Details Description Which Difficulty Level Low Root or Sudo Privileges No
The usermod command is a user management tool to modify user account information like username, user ID, default shell, home directory, and many more. Tutorial Details Description Usermod (Modify User Information) Difficulty Level Moderate Root or Sudo Privileges Yes OS Compatibility Ubuntu, Manjaro, Fedora, etc.
The gpasswd command is used to administer “/etc/group” and “/etc/gshadow” file but that does not give you the complete context. In other words, using the gpasswd command, you can add or remove users from a group, add or remove passwords from a group, promote a
The getent command is used to fetch entries from the administrative text files, also known as databases. The supported databases are ahosts, ahostsv4, ahostsv6, aliases, ethers, group, gshadow, hosts, initgroups, netgroup, networks, passwd, protocols, rpc, services, and shadow. In this article, you will learn how
Every user in Linux is assigned with unique IDs, a.k.a. UIDs, and groups are assigned with group IDs, a.k.a. GIDs; groups can even contain more than one user identity that you can later use to manage users in that group. To know all the users’
The Linux system consists of multiple users and groups; there might be a large number of users in your system that can be easily managed by adding them to a specific group. After adding them, you can easily assign different permissions and policies to that
Linux administrators are allowed to create “normal user accounts” with a range from 1000 to 60000 uids, where uid 0 is reserved for “root users” and “system users” are allowed uids from 1 to 999. Normal users might rarely reach this threshold, creating so many
