Deck 1: Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator

Question 1

Which of the following commands will write a message to the terminals of all logged in users?

A) bcast
B) mesg
C) print
D) wall
E) yell

Answer 1

wall

Question 2

Which function key is used to start Safe Mode in Windows NT?

A) F10
B) F8
C) F6
D) Windows NT does not support Safe Mode

Answer 2

Windows NT does not support Safe Mode

Question 3

What can the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) be used for? (Choose THREE correct choices.)

A) To create RAID 9 arrays.
B) To dynamically change the size of logical volumes.
C) To encrypt logical volumes.
D) To create snapshots.
E) To dynamically create or delete logical volumes.

Answer 3

To dynamically change the size of logical volumes.
To create snapshots.
To dynamically create or delete logical volumes.

Question 4

Which of the following commands reboots the system when using SysV init? (Choose TWO correct choices.)

A) shutdown -r now
B) shutdown -r "rebooting"
C) telinit 6
D) telinit 0
E) shutdown -k now "rebooting"

Question 5

Which run levels should never be declared as the default run level when using SysV init? (Choose TWO correct choices.)

A) 0
B) 1
C) 3
D) 5
E) 6

Question 6

Which of the following options is used in a GRUB Legacy configuration file to define the amount of time that the GRUB menu will be shown to the user?

A) hidemenu
B) splash
C) timeout
D) showmenu

Question 7

Which of the following are init systems used within Linux systems? (Choose THREE correct choices.)

A) startd
B) systemd
C) Upstart
D) SysInit
E) SysV init

Question 8

When removing a package, which of the following dpkg options will completely remove the files including configuration files?

A) --clean
B) --delete
C) --purge
D) -remove

Question 9

Which of the following information is stored within the BIOS? (Choose TWO correct choices.)

A) Boot device order
B) Linux kernel version
C) Timezone
D) Hardware configuration
E) The system's hostname

Question 10

What information can the lspci command display about the system hardware? (Choose THREE correct choices.)

A) Device IRQ settings
B) PCI bus speed
C) System battery type
D) Device vendor identification
E) Ethernet MAC address

Question 11

Which of the following commands overwrites the bootloader located on /dev/sda without overwriting the partition table or any data following it?

A) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512
B) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
C) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=440 count=1
D) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=440

Question 12

Which of the following options for the kernel's command line changes the systemd boot target to rescue.target instead of the default target?

A) systemd.target=rescue.target
B) systemd.runlevel=rescue.target
C) systemd.service=rescue.target
D) systemd.default=rescue.target
E) systemd.unit=rescue.target

Question 13

When using rpm --verify to check files created during the installation of RPM packages, which of the following information is taken into consideration? (Choose THREE correct choices.)

A) Timestamps
B) MD5 checksums
C) Inodes
D) File sizes
E) GnuPG signatures

Question 14

Which of the following environment variables overrides or extends the list of directories holding shared libraries?

A) LD_LOAD_PATH
B) LD_LIB_PATH
C) LD_LIBRARY_PATH
D) LD_SHARE_PATH
E) LD_RUN_PATH

Question 15

Which of the following is correct when talking about mount points?

A) Every existing directory can be used as a mount point.
B) Only empty directories can be used as a mount point.
C) Directories need to have the SetUID flag set to be used as a mount point.
D) Files within a directory are deleted when the directory is used as a mount point.

Question 16

Which of the following commands brings a system running SysV init into a state in which it is safe to perform maintenance tasks? (Choose TWO correct choices.)

A) shutdown -R 1 now
B) shutdown -single now
C) init 1
D) telinit 1
E) runlevel 1

Question 17

In Bash, inserting 1>&2 after a command redirects

A) standard error to standard input.
B) standard input to standard error.
C) standard output to standard error.
D) standard error to standard output.
E) standard output to standard input.

Question 18

During a system boot cycle, what program is executed after the BIOS completes its tasks?

A) The bootloader
B) The inetd program
C) The init program
D) The kernel

Question 19

Which of the following commands is used to update the list of available packages when using dpkg based package management?

A) apt-get update
B) apt-get upgrade
C) apt-cache update
D) apt-get refresh
E) apt-cache upgrade

Question 20

What of the following statements are true regarding /dev/ when using udev? (Choose TWO correct choices.)

A) Entries for all possible devices get created on boot even if those devices are not connected.
B) Additional rules for udev can be created by adding them to /etc/udev/rules.d/.
C) When using udev, it is not possible to create block or character devices in /dev/ using mknod.
D) The /dev/ directory is a filesystem of type tmpfs and is mounted by udev during system startup.
E) The content of /dev/ is stored in /etc/udev/dev and is restored during system startup.

Question 21

Which of the following commands will send output from the program myapp to both standard output (stdout) and the file file1.log?

A) cat < myapp | cat > file1.log
B) myapp 0>&1 | cat > file1.log
C) myapp | cat > file1.log
D) myapp | tee file1.log
E) tee myapp file1.log

Question 22

Which of the following commands displays the contents of a gzip compressed tar archive?

A) gzip archive.tgz | tar xvf -
B) tar ztf archive.tgz
C) gzip -d archive.tgz | tar tvf -
D) tar cf archive.tgz

Question 23

What is the maximum niceness value that a regular user can assign to a process with the nice command when executing a new process?

A) 9
B) 19
C) 49
D) 99

Question 24

Which of the following commands is used to change options and positional parameters for a running Bash?

A) history
B) set
C) bashconf
D) setsh
E) envsetup

Question 25

Immediately after deleting 3 lines of text in vi and moving the cursor to a different line, which single character command will insert the deleted content below the current line?

A) i (lowercase)
B) P (uppercase)
C) p (lowercase)
D) U (uppercase)
E) u (lowercase)

Question 26

Which of the following commands kills the process with the PID 123 but allows the process to "clean up" before exiting?

A) kill -PIPE 123
B) kill -KILL 123
C) kill -STOP 123
D) kill -TERM 123

Question 27

Which of the following commands replaces each occurrence of 'bob' in the file letter with 'Bob' and writes the result to the file newletter?

A) sed '/bob/Bob' letter > newletter
B) sed s/bob/Bob/ letter < newletter
C) sed 's/bob/Bob' letter > newletter
D) sed 's/bob/Bob/g' letter > newletter
E) sed 's/bob, Bob/' letter > newletter

Question 28

Which of the following characters can be combined with a separator string in order to read from the current input source until the separator string, which is on a separate line and without any trailing spaces, is reached?

A) <<
B) <|
C) !<
D) &<

Question 29

What is the purpose of the Bash built-in export command?

A) It allows disks to be mounted remotely.
B) It runs a command as a process in a subshell.
C) It makes the command history available to subshells.
D) It sets up environment variables for applications.
E) It shares NFS partitions for use by other systems on the network.

Question 30

What does the symbol within regular expressions represent?

A) Match the preceding qualifier one or more times.
B) Match the preceding qualifier zero or more times.
C) Match the preceding qualifier zero or one times.
D) Match a literal character.

Question 31

Which of the following commands moves and resumes in the background the last stopped shell job?

A) run
B) bg
C) fg
D) back

Question 32

In the vi editor, how can commands such as moving the cursor or copying lines into the buffer be issued multiple times or applied to multiple rows?

A) By using the command :repeat followed by the number and the command.
B) By specifying the number right in front of a command such as 4l or 2yj.
C) By selecting all affected lines using the shift and cursor keys before applying the command.
D) By issuing a command such as :set repetition=4 which repeats every subsequent command 4 times.

Question 33

What command will generate a list of user names from /etc/passwd along with their login shell?

A) column -s : 1,7 /etc/passwd
B) chop -c 1,7 /etc/passwd
C) colrm 1,7 /etc/passwd
D) cut -d: -f1,7 /etc/passwd

Question 34

Which grep command will print only the lines that do not end with a / in the file foo?

A) grep '/$' foo
B) grep '/#' foo
C) grep -v '/$' foo
D) grep -v '/#' foo

Question 35

In a nested directory structure, which find command line option would be used to restrict the command to searching down a particular number of subdirectories?

A) -dirmax
B) -maxdepth
C) -maxlevels
D) -n
E) -s

Question 36

Which of the following files, located in the user home directory, is used to store the Bash history?

A) .bash_history
B) .bash_histfile
C) .history
D) .bashrc_history
E) .history_bash

Question 37

What is the difference between the i and a commands of the vi editor?

A) i (interactive) requires the user to explicitly switch between vi modes whereas a (automatic) switches modes automatically.
B) i (insert) inserts text before the current cursor position whereas a (append) inserts text after the cursor.
C) i (independent rows) starts every new line at the first character whereas a (aligned rows) keeps the indentation of the previous line.
D) i (interrupt) temporarily suspends editing of a file to the background whereas a (abort) terminates editing.

Question 38

A user accidentally created the subdirectory \dir in his home directory. Which of the following commands will remove that directory?

A) rmdir '~/\dir'
B) rmdir "~/\dir"
C) rmdir ~/'dir'
D) rmdir ~/\dir
E) rmdir ~/\\dir

Question 39

In compliance with the FHS, in which of the directories are man pages found?

A) / usr /share/man
B) /opt/man
C) / usr /doc/
D) /var/pkg/man
E) /var/man

Question 40

What is the default action of the split command on an input file?

A) It will break the file into new files of 1,024 byte pieces each.
B) It will break the file into new files of 1,000 line pieces each.
C) It will break the file into new files of 1,024 kilobyte pieces each.
D) It will break the file into new files that are no more than 5% of the size of the original file.

Question 41

Which of the following commands can be used to search for the executable file foo when it has been placed in a directory not included in $PATH?

A) apropos
B) which
C) find
D) query
E) whereis

Question 42

Which of the following signals is sent to a process when the key combination CTRL+C is pressed on the keyboard?

A) SIGTERM
B) SIGINT
C) SIGSTOP
D) SIGKILL

Question 43

Which of the following is the device file name for the second partition on the only SCSI drive?

A) /dev/hda1
B) /dev/sda2
C) /dev/sd0a2
D) /dev/sd1p2

Question 44

Which of the following commands will print the last 10 lines of a text file to the standard output?

A) cat -n 10 filename
B) dump -n 10 filename
C) head -n 10 filename
D) tail -n 10 filename

Question 45

In order to display all currently mounted filesystems, which of the following commands could be used? (Choose TWO correct choices.)

A) cat /proc/self/mounts
B) free
C) mount
D) lsmounts
E) cat /proc/filesystems

Question 46

Which of the following command sets the Bash variable named TEST with the content FOO?

A) set TEST="FOO"
B) TEST = "FOO"
C) var TEST="FOO"
D) TEST="FOO"

Question 47

Which of the following commands makes /bin/foo executable by everyone but writable only by its owner?

A) chmod u=rwx,go=rx /bin/foo
B) chmod o+rwx,a+rx /bin/foo
C) chmod 577 /bin/foo
D) chmod 775 /bin/foo

Question 48

Which of the following commands will reduce all consecutive spaces down to a single space?

A) tr '\s' ' ' < a.txt > b.txt
B) tr -c ' ' < a.txt > b.txt
C) tr -d ' ' < a.txt > b.txt
D) tr -r ' ' '\n' < a.txt > b.txt
E) tr -s ' ' < a.txt > b.txt

Question 49

Which of the following shell redirections will write standard output and standard error output to a file named filename?

A) 2>&1 >filename
B) >filename 2>&1
C) 1>&2>filename
D) >>filename
E) 1&2>filename

Question 50

Which character, added to the end of a command, runs that command in the background as a child process of the current shell?

A) !
B) +
C) &
D) %
E) #

Question 51

What happens after issuing the command vi without any additional parameters?

A) vi starts and loads the last file used and moves the cursor to the position where vi was when it last exited.
B) vi starts and requires the user to explicitly either create a new or load an existing file.
C) vi exits with an error message as it cannot be invoked without a file name to operate on.
D) vi starts in command mode and opens a new empty file.
E) vi starts and opens a new file which is filled with the content of the vi buffer if the buffer contains text.

Question 52

Which of the following commands can be used to locate programs and their corresponding man pages and configuration files?

A) dirname
B) which
C) basename
D) query
E) whereis

Question 53

Which of the following commands changes the ownership of file.txt to the user dan and the group staff?

A) chown dan/staff file.txt
B) chown dan:staff file.txt
C) chown -u dan -g staff file.txt
D) chown dan -g staff file.txt

Question 54

Regarding the command: nice -5 / usr /bin/prog Which of the following statements is correct?

A) / usr /bin/prog is executed with a nice level of -5.
B) / usr /bin/prog is executed with a nice level of 5.
C) / usr /bin/prog is executed with a priority of -5.
D) / usr /bin/prog is executed with a priority of 5.

Question 55

When running the command sed -e "s/a/b/" /tmp/file >/tmp/file While /tmp/file contains data, why is /tmp/file empty afterwards?

A) The file order is incorrect. The destination file must be mentioned before the command to ensure redirection.
B) The command sed did not match anything in that file therefore the output is empty.
C) When the shell establishes the redirection it overwrites the target file before the redirected command starts and opens it for reading.
D) Redirection for shell commands do not work using the > character. It only works using the | character instead.

Question 56

Which of the following commands changes the number of days before the ext3 filesystem on /dev/sda1 has to run through a full filesystem check while booting?

A) tune2fs -d 200 /dev/sda1
B) tune2fs -c 200 /dev/sda1
C) tune2fs -i 200 /dev/sda1
D) tune2fs -n 200 /dev/sda1
E) tune2fs --days 200 /dev/sda1

Question 57

When starting a program with the nice command without any additional parameters, which nice level is set for the resulting process?

A) -10
B) 0
C) 10
D) 20

Question 58

Which of the following are valid stream redirection operators within Bash? (Choose THREE correct choices.)

A) <
B) <<<
C) >
D) >>>
E) %>

Question 59

When given the following command line. echo "foo bar" | tee bar | cat Which of the following output is created?

A) cat
B) foo bar
C) tee bar
D) bar
E) foo

Question 60

Which type of filesystem is created by mkfs when it is executed with the block device name only and without any additional parameters?

A) ext2
B) ext3
C) ext4
D) XFS
E) VFAT

Question 61

What output will the command seq 10 produce?

A) A continuous stream of numbers increasing in increments of 10 until stopped.
B) The numbers 1 through 10 with one number per line.
C) The numbers 0 through 9 with one number per line.
D) The number 10 to standard output.

Question 62

What is the purpose of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard?

A) It is a security model used to ensure files are organized according to their permissions and accessibility.
B) It provides unified tools to create, maintain and manage multiple filesystems in a common way.
C) It defines a common internal structure of inodes for all compliant filesystems.
D) It is a distribution neutral description of locations of files and directories.

Question 63

Which of the following Linux filesystems preallocates a fixed number of inodes at the filesystem's make/creation time and does NOT generate them as needed? (Choose TWO correct choices.)

A) ext3
B) JFS
C) ext2
D) XFS
E) procfs

Question 64

What output will the following command sequence produce?     echo '1 2 3 4 5 6' | while read a b c; do         echo result: $c $b $a;     done

A) result: 3 4 5 6 2 1
B) result: 1 2 3 4 5 6
C) result: 6 5 4
D) result: 6 5 4 3 2 1
E) result: 3 2 1

Question 65

Which of the following pieces of information of an existing file is changed when a hard link pointing to that file is created?

A) File size
B) Modify timestamp
C) Link count
D) Inode number
E) Permissions

Question 66

Which utility would be used to change how often a filesystem check is performed on an ext2 filesystem without losing any data stored on that filesystem?

A) mod2fs
B) fsck
C) tune2fs
D) mke2fs
E) fixe2fs

Question 67

Which of the following commands creates an ext3 filesystem on /dev/sdb1? (Choose TWO correct choices.)

A) /sbin/mke2fs -j /dev/sdb1
B) /sbin/mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdb1
C) /sbin/mkfs -c ext3 /dev/sdb1
D) /sbin/mke3fs -j /dev/sdb1

Question 68

After running the command umount /mnt, the following error message is displayed: umount: /mnt: device is busy. What is a common reason for this message?

A) The kernel has not finished flushing disk writes to the mounted device.
B) A user has a file open in the /mnt directory.
C) Another file system still contains a symlink to a file inside /mnt.
D) The files in /mnt have been scanned and added to the locate database.
E) The kernel thinks that a process is about to open a file in /mnt for reading.

Question 69

Which of the following commands set the sticky bit for the directory /tmp? (Choose TWO correct choices.)

A) chmod +s /tmp
B) chmod +t /tmp
C) chmod 1775 /tmp
D) chmod 4775 /tmp
E) chmod 2775 /tmp

Question 70

What do the permissions -rwSr-xr-x mean for a binary file when it is executed as a command?

A) The command is SetUID and it will be executed with the effective rights of the owner.
B) The command will be executed with the effective rights of the group instead of the owner.
C) The execute flag is not set for the owner. Therefore the SetUID flag is ignored.
D) The command will be executed with the effective rights of the owner and group.

Question 71

Instead of supplying an explicit device in /etc/fstab for mounting, what other options may be used to identify the intended partition? (Choose TWO correct choices.)

A) FIND
B) ID
C) LABEL
D) NAME
E) UUID

Question 72

After issuing: function myfunction { echo $1 $2 ; } in Bash, which output does: myfunction A B C Produce?

A) A B
B) A B C
C) A C
D) B C
E) C B A

Question 73

What does the command mount -a do?

A) It mounts all available filesystems onto the current directory.
B) It shows all mounted filesystems.
C) It mounts all user mountable filesystems for the current user.
D) It mounts all filesystems listed in /etc/fstab which have the option auto set.
E) It mounts all filesystems listed in /etc/fstab which have the option noauto set.

Question 74

Which of the following files, when existing, affect the behavior of the Bash shell? (Choose TWO correct choices.)

A) ~/.bashconf
B) ~/.bashrc
C) ~/.bashdefaults
D) ~/.bash_etc
E) ~/.bash_profile

Question 75

What is the difference between the commands test -e path and test -f path?

A) They are equivalent options with the same behavior.
B) The -f option tests for a regular file.  The -e option tests for an empty file.
C) Both options check the existence of the path.  The -f option also confirms that it is a regular file.
D) The -f option tests for a regular file.  The -e option tests for an executable file.

Question 76

Which of the following commands will change the quota for a specific user?

A) edquota
B) repquota
C) quota -e
D) quota

Question 77

Creating a hard link to an ordinary file returns an error. What could be the reason for this?

A) The source file is hidden.
B) The source file is read-only.
C) The source file is a shell script.
D) The source file is already a hard link.
E) The source and the target are on different filesystems.

Question 78

Which of the following commands puts the output of the command date into the shell variable mydate?

A) mydate="$(date)"
B) mydate="exec date"
C) mydate="$((date))"
D) mydate="date"
E) mydate="${date}"

Question 79

When the command echo $ outputs 1, which of the following statements is true?

A) It is the process ID of the echo command.
B) It is the process ID of the current shell.
C) It is the exit value of the command executed immediately before echo.
D) It is the exit value of the echo command.

Question 80

How many fields are in a syntactically correct line of /etc/fstab?

A) 3
B) 4
C) 5
D) 6
E) 7