Whenever you operate a Linux system behind the scenes, you might be encountering the interactive login or non-login shell. The most important thing is that you are not aware of them, so you don’t know when they are switching, and this lack of knowledge makes
The bash or any other shell uses multiple profiles, also known as shell configuration files, like “/etc/profile“, “~/.bash_profile“, “~/.profile“, “~/.bash_login“, “~/.bashrc“, “~/.bash_history“, and “~/.bash_logout” to configure the user’s interactive login or non-login shell. Files Description /etc/profile It stores the variables, aliases, functions, etc. that are
The environment variables are a set of key-value pairs that define the shell environment and can affect the behavior of the ongoing programs that are executed in the current shell session. The programs running in the current shell session can access the variable values from
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
