Chapter 3: Basic Linux System Administration Commands
In this chapter, you'll learn what system administration commands are, how to check system info, manage processes, and monitor resources in Linux.
In Chapter 2 of the LFCA Certification Course, you learned how to navigate the filesystem, create and delete files and directories, and search for files using the find command and locate command.
This chapter moves up a level, from working with individual files to working with the system itself, covering the commands a sysadmin reaches for when something needs investigation, checking what the system is doing, who's logged in, what processes are running, and how much disk and memory are left.
These commands map directly to the Linux Fundamentals domain (16%) and the System Administration Fundamentals domain (30%) of the LFCA exam, and they'll appear in job interviews, daily sysadmin work, and certification exams well beyond LFCA.
Every command in this chapter was tested on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, but they work on any modern Linux distribution, including Debian, Fedora, Rocky Linux, and RHEL.