010-160 Practice Test 3 — 10 Questions

Question 1

A Linux administrator needs to grant a contractor temporary read and write access to a project directory without adding the contractor's account to a shared group or changing ownership of existing files. Which approach best meets this requirement while following standard Linux permission practice?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

Use setfacl to add an access ACL entry granting the contractor rw on the directory and its contents.. POSIX access control lists allow permissions to be assigned to specific named users and groups beyond the three traditional classes. Using setfacl to add an entry for the contractor grants exactly the needed read and write rights on the project directory without disturbing group membership or ownership, and the entry can later be revoked with setfacl -x to end access.

Answer

Set the directory permissions to 777 so the contractor can read and write regardless of ownership.

Answer

Change the directory's group to the contractor's primary group and set permissions to 770.

Answer

Create a hard link to the directory inside the contractor's home directory.

Question 2

A new administrator wants to see the manual page for the `cp` command to check its options. Which command should they run?

Accepted Answer

man cp. The man command is the standard interface to the system's manual pages. Running `man cp` displays the cp manual, covering syntax, options, and examples. Other tools like help are limited to shell built-ins, and info or custom doc commands are not universally available or standard for this purpose.

Answer

info cp

Answer

doc cp

Answer

help cp

Question 3

A Linux administrator is working in a directory with many files and wants to identify files by their type and permissions without opening them. Which TWO commands can provide this information? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

ls -l. To identify file type and permissions without opening files, ls -l provides permissions and type indicators, while file determines the content type. Together they cover both needs. cat and less open file contents, which is not desired, and stat focuses on metadata like permissions but does not classify content type as file does. Thus, ls -l and file are the two appropriate commands.

Answer

stat

Answer

cat

Answer

less

Question 4

A developer is looking for a career that involves 'DevOps' in a Linux environment. Which skill set is most relevant for this role?

Accepted Answer

Automating infrastructure deployment and managing CI/CD pipelines.. DevOps in a Linux environment centers on automating infrastructure provisioning and managing continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines, typically using tools like Ansible, Terraform, Jenkins, GitLab CI, and Kubernetes. This skill set directly maps to the cultural and technical goals of DevOps: faster, repeatable, and reliable software delivery. The other options describe unrelated career tracks.

Answer

Writing only proprietary firmware for microcontrollers.

Answer

Selling commercial hardware to enterprise customers.

Answer

Creating graphic design assets for software GUIs.

Question 5

A technician is examining files in /var/tmp and needs to identify which entries are directories rather than regular files. Which two commands can provide this information? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

ls -l /var/tmp. Both ls -l and file reveal the nature of each entry: the long listing encodes the type in its first character, and the file utility prints a descriptive type for every argument. The remaining commands either print raw contents, summarize total disk usage, or count bytes, none of which separates directories from regular files in /var/tmp.

Answer

wc -c /var/tmp

Answer

cat /var/tmp/*

Answer

du -sh /var/tmp

Question 6

Which TWO statements regarding the 'umask' command are correct?

Accepted Answer

It sets default permissions for new files.. Option B is correct because umask defines the default permission bits that are removed when a new file or directory is created, so it directly sets the default permissions for new files (e.g., a umask of 022 yields 644 for files and 755 for directories). Option E is correct because umask works by masking, or clearing, permission bits from the base creation mode (666 for files, 777 for directories) so those bits are not set on newly created files. Option A is wrong because any user can set their own umask, not just root. Option C is wrong because umask is a shell/process attribute typically set in shell profiles like /etc/profile or ~/.bashrc, not stored in /etc/shadow, which holds password hashes. Option D is wrong because umask only affects files created after it is set; it does not retroactively change permissions on existing files.

Answer

It can only be set by root.

Answer

It is stored in /etc/shadow.

Answer

It applies to existing files immediately.

Question 7

To sort the lines of a text file numerically instead of alphabetically, which flag do you use?

Accepted Answer

sort -n. The -n flag tells sort to perform a numeric sort, comparing lines by their numeric value rather than lexicographically. This is essential when sorting numbers like 2, 10, 100, which would otherwise sort as 10, 100, 2 alphabetically.

Answer

sort -f

Answer

sort -u

Answer

sort -r

Question 8

You need to ensure that a server's time is synchronized with an external time source to prevent authentication errors. Which daemon is responsible for this?

Accepted Answer

chronyd. chronyd is the NTP daemon on modern RHEL/CentOS/Fedora and many other distributions, responsible for synchronizing the system clock with external time sources. Accurate time is critical for Kerberos authentication, TLS certificate validation, and log correlation. The other daemons handle scheduling, remote access, and logging, not time synchronization.

Answer

cron

Answer

sshd

Answer

rsyslogd

Question 9

Which THREE of the following represent ways to manipulate command output in a pipe?

Accepted Answer

grep. grep is correct because it filters piped input line-by-line using pattern matching and emits only matching lines to stdout, which is a classic way to manipulate command output in a pipe. wc is correct because it consumes piped input and produces counts of lines, words, and bytes (with -l, -w, -c), transforming the stream into summary output. sed is correct because it is a stream editor that reads piped input and performs non-interactive text transformations such as substitution (s/old/new/g), deletion, and printing, directly manipulating the output stream. cd is not correct because it is a shell builtin that changes the current working directory and does not read stdin or transform piped data. pwd is not correct because it simply prints the current working directory name and does not accept or manipulate piped input.

Answer

cd

Answer

pwd

Question 10

What does the command 'history' do?

Accepted Answer

It prints the command history list.. The 'history' command in Bash and other POSIX shells prints the numbered list of previously executed commands stored in the shell's history buffer (typically ~/.bash_history). It is a shell builtin, not an external binary, and it reads from the in-memory history list maintained per session. This is the standard way to review and recall prior commands for reuse or auditing.

Answer

It shows the date and time of file creation.

Answer

It displays the system log history.

Answer

It deletes all previous command history.