010-160 Practice Questions 1 — 50 Questions

Question 1

What is the result of the command 'ls -la | grep "^d"'?

Accepted Answer

It lists only directories in the current directory.. The command 'ls -la | grep "^d"' lists all files and directories in long format, including hidden ones, and then filters the output to show only lines starting with 'd', which indicates a directory. Thus, it lists only directories in the current directory.

Answer

It shows only hidden files.

Answer

It lists files that contain the letter 'd'.

Answer

It deletes all directories.

Question 2

A hospital's IT department wants to adopt a Linux-based electronic records system. Legal counsel insists that the hospital be able to audit and modify the source code to meet patient-data regulations, and that any redistributed improvements remain under the same freedoms. Which licensing approach best satisfies counsel's requirements?

Accepted Answer

A copyleft license such as the GNU GPL, because derivative works must be distributed under the same license terms.. Counsel wants both the ability to audit and modify source code and the guarantee that redistributed improvements stay open. A copyleft license such as the GNU GPL provides exactly those rights and obligations. Permissive and public domain licenses allow proprietary relicensing downstream, and escrow grants only conditional access without modification rights.

Answer

A proprietary license with a source-code escrow agreement, because escrow guarantees permanent access to the code.

Answer

A public domain dedication, because it removes all restrictions and lets the hospital do anything it wants.

Answer

A permissive license such as MIT, because it allows modification without any redistribution conditions.

Question 3

A junior administrator is asked to verify whether a newly installed application is truly open source. The application's documentation states that the source code is available but forbids modification and redistribution. Which statement best evaluates this claim?

Accepted Answer

It does not qualify as open source because modification and redistribution are prohibited.. Open source requires more than visible source code; the license must permit modification and redistribution. Because this application forbids both, it fails the Open Source Initiative definition and should be treated as source-available or proprietary despite its published code.

Answer

It qualifies as open source because users can read and audit the code.

Answer

It qualifies as open source because the source code is publicly available.

Answer

It qualifies as open source if the vendor provides the source code on request.

Question 4

A security audit requires reviewing which local accounts exist on a Linux server, which of them have usable login shells, and which groups each account belongs to. Which TWO commands or files provide authoritative local account and group membership information? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

/etc/passwd. Local account records live in /etc/passwd, and local group definitions with supplementary members live in /etc/group. Reading them together reveals which accounts exist, what login shells they have, and which groups each belongs to. The shadow file covers passwords, skel provides templates, and nsswitch merely directs lookup order, so those three do not supply the required listings.

Answer

/etc/shadow

Answer

/etc/skel

Answer

/etc/nsswitch.conf

Question 5

You need to append the output of a command to an existing file without overwriting it. Which operator should you use?

Accepted Answer

>>. The >> operator redirects standard output and appends it to the end of an existing file, preserving the file's current contents. This is the standard shell mechanism for adding output without truncating the file. Using >> is the correct way to log or accumulate command results over time.

Answer

|

Answer

>

Answer

&

Question 6

A Linux administrator is reviewing how environment variables affect command execution. Which TWO of the following statements about environment variables are correct? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Environment variables are always inherited by child processes unless explicitly unset.. PATH determines where the shell looks for executables, and environment variables are inherited by child processes by default. These two properties are central to how commands are located and how settings propagate in a Linux session. The other statements misidentify HOME and PS1 and incorrectly restrict variable setting to root, so they are not correct.

Answer

Environment variables can only be set by the root user.

Answer

The PS1 variable controls the system's primary network interface.

Answer

The HOME variable stores the system's hostname.

Question 7

A user wants to find all files under /var/log that have been modified within the last 24 hours and are larger than 1 MB, then save the list to /tmp/recent_large.txt. Which command accomplishes this?

Accepted Answer

find /var/log -type f -mtime -1 -size +1M > /tmp/recent_large.txt. The find command is designed to search for files based on metadata such as modification time and size. Using -mtime -1 selects files modified within the last 24 hours, and -size +1M selects files larger than 1 MB. Redirection saves the output. The other commands lack these filtering capabilities or misinterpret the options.

Answer

ls -lR /var/log | awk '$6 > 1 && $7 > 1' > /tmp/recent_large.txt

Answer

locate -mtime -1 -size +1M /var/log > /tmp/recent_large.txt

Answer

grep -R -l --include='*' -mtime -1 -size +1M /var/log > /tmp/recent_large.txt

Question 8

While troubleshooting a script, you run `grep -n 'error' /var/log/app.log` and see output lines prefixed with numbers. A colleague asks what those numbers represent. What do they indicate?

Accepted Answer

The line number in the file where each matching line occurs.. The -n flag tells grep to prefix each matching line with its line number in the source file. This helps pinpoint where matches occur without opening an editor. Other grep flags like -c count matches and -b show byte offsets, but only -n provides the line position shown in the scenario.

Answer

The total count of matching lines found in the file.

Answer

The process ID of the application that wrote each log entry.

Answer

The byte offset from the start of the file to each match.

Question 9

A nonprofit is drafting a policy that explains how its staff may legally use and redistribute open source software. The draft must correctly reflect the freedoms that free and open source licenses grant to recipients. Which two statements accurately describe those freedoms? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Recipients may study the source code and modify it to suit their needs. Free and open source licenses grant recipients the freedom to use software for any purpose, including commercial activity, and to study and modify its source code. These two permissions form the backbone of both the Free Software Definition and the Open Source Definition. Mandatory licensing fees, organization-only redistribution, and removal of copyright notices are not granted rights and would misrepresent the legal position of the nonprofit's staff.

Answer

Recipients must always pay a licensing fee to the original author before deploying the software

Answer

Recipients may remove the original author's copyright notice before publishing modified versions

Answer

Recipients may redistribute the software only within the same organization that originally obtained it

Question 10

You want to execute two commands sequentially, but only if the first command succeeds. Which operator is used?

Accepted Answer

&&. The && operator is the logical AND control operator in Bash and other POSIX shells. It executes the command on the right only if the command on the left exits with a status of 0 (success). This is the standard way to chain commands with a success dependency, such as 'make && make install'.

Answer

;

Answer

||

Answer

|

Question 11

A support technician must read a very large log file, /var/log/messages, and only wants the portion that begins with the line containing the timestamp 'Mar 14 09:15' and continues to the end of the file. Which command should the technician run?

Accepted Answer

sed -n '/Mar 14 09:15/,$p' /var/log/messages. Stream editors such as sed can select a range defined by a pattern and a terminating address. Using the timestamp as the starting address and the end-of-file symbol as the closing address prints precisely the tail portion that begins at the matching line, which is what the technician needs when the log is too large to page through manually.

Answer

grep -c 'Mar 14 09:15' /var/log/messages

Answer

tail -n 50 /var/log/messages

Answer

head -n 50 /var/log/messages

Question 12

A Linux system administrator notices that the /var/log directory is filling up quickly. They want to find the largest files within that directory tree to identify what is consuming space. Which command will accomplish this?

Accepted Answer

du -ah /var/log | sort -rh | head -n 10. The combination of du -ah, sort -rh, and head -n 10 provides a sorted list of the largest files and directories under /var/log. This allows the administrator to quickly identify space hogs. Other commands either filter by size, limit to one directory level, or show filesystem-wide usage, which are not as effective for this specific task.

Answer

df -h /var/log

Answer

ls -lS /var/log

Answer

find /var/log -type f -size +100M

Question 13

Which of the following commands is used to create an empty file or update the timestamp of an existing file?

Accepted Answer

touch. The `touch` command is specifically designed to create an empty file if it does not exist, or update the access and modification timestamps of an existing file to the current time. It does this by making a `utime()` system call, which sets the file's timestamps without altering its content. This is the standard Linux/Unix utility for timestamp manipulation and empty file creation.

Answer

cp

Answer

mkdir

Answer

mv

Question 14

Why do many enterprise Linux distributions choose to delay the inclusion of the absolute latest kernel version?

Accepted Answer

Because they prioritize stability and extensive testing to ensure production uptime.. Enterprise distributions such as RHEL, SLES, and Ubuntu LTS deliberately backport fixes to older, well-tested kernels rather than shipping the newest upstream release. This prioritizes stability, hardware/driver compatibility, and predictable behavior so that production workloads and certified ISV applications continue to run without regression. Extensive QA, regression testing, and vendor certification cycles take time, which is why enterprise kernels lag mainline.

Answer

Because the latest kernel is always incompatible with proprietary software.

Answer

Because they are legally required to wait 12 months.

Answer

Because they lack the technical staff to compile new kernels.

Question 15

Which TWO of the following tools allow you to manage disk partitions?

Accepted Answer

fdisk. fdisk (A) is a classic Linux command-line utility used to create, delete, resize, and manage disk partitions on MBR and (in recent versions) GPT disks, so it directly satisfies the requirement. parted (B) is another partition-management tool that supports both MBR and GPT partitioning schemes and can create, resize, move, and delete partitions, making it equally valid for this task. The remaining options do not manage partitions: cat (C) concatenates and displays file contents, sed (D) is a stream editor for text transformation, and grep (E) searches text for pattern matches.

Answer

cat

Answer

sed

Answer

grep

Question 16

You are configuring a temporary directory where multiple users save files. To ensure that users can only delete their own files and not files created by others, what must you set?

Accepted Answer

chmod +t /tmp/shared. The sticky bit (chmod +t) on a shared directory ensures that only the file's owner (or root) can delete or rename files within it, even if the directory is world-writable. This is exactly the behaviour needed for /tmp-style shared drop boxes where multiple users write files but must not remove each other's data. The kernel enforces this by checking the file owner against the deleting user before permitting unlink or rename.

Answer

chown root /tmp/shared

Answer

chmod 777 /tmp/shared

Answer

umask 077

Question 17

A junior administrator needs to let a colleague in the accounting group read and write the shared report at /srv/reports/q3.csv, but no one outside that group should have any access. The file is currently owned by the administrator. Which command accomplishes this by changing only the group ownership to 'accounting'?

Accepted Answer

chgrp accounting /srv/reports/q3.csv. Group ownership is stored as a numeric GID in the file's inode and is changed with chgrp, or equivalently with chown using a colon separator. Using chgrp accounting changes only that metadata field, so the subsequent permission bits for the group category will apply to accounting members. Tools that edit user accounts or that only touch mode bits cannot perform this change.

Answer

chmod g=accounting /srv/reports/q3.csv

Answer

usermod -g accounting /srv/reports/q3.csv

Answer

chown accounting /srv/reports/q3.csv

Question 18

A systems administrator is evaluating career paths within the Linux and open source ecosystem. The administrator is interested in roles that combine system operations with software development practices. Which two activities are most characteristic of a DevOps-oriented Linux role? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Writing and maintaining infrastructure as code using tools such as Ansible, Terraform, or shell scripts to automate provisioning and configuration.. DevOps-oriented Linux roles emphasize automation and collaboration between operations and development. Writing infrastructure as code and building CI/CD pipelines are two defining activities because they replace manual, inconsistent processes with versioned, repeatable automation. Manual installations, annual freezes, and avoiding version control represent traditional practices that DevOps seeks to move away from.

Answer

Avoiding version control systems and keeping configuration changes only in local notes on each administrator's workstation for speed.

Answer

Manually installing each server from physical installation media and configuring every service by hand to ensure unique, tailored setups.

Answer

Restricting all application changes to an annual release window and freezing the environment for the rest of the year to minimize risk.

Question 19

You need to change the ownership of a file to user 'admin'. Which command is the correct way to do this?

Accepted Answer

chown admin file. The `chown` (change owner) command is specifically designed to change the ownership of files and directories. Running `chown admin file` sets the user 'admin' as the owner of 'file'. This is the correct and standard tool for ownership changes on Linux.

Answer

usermod admin file

Answer

chmod admin file

Answer

chgrp admin file

Question 20

You want to change the primary group of an existing user named 'bob' to 'staff'. Which command should you use?

Accepted Answer

usermod -g staff bob. The usermod command modifies existing user account attributes, and the -g flag specifically sets the user's primary group (the GID stored in /etc/passwd). Running 'usermod -g staff bob' changes bob's primary group to staff while leaving his supplementary group memberships intact. This is the standard, correct way to reassign a primary group on a Linux system.

Answer

groupmod -n staff bob

Answer

chgrp staff bob

Answer

usermod -G staff bob