[svlug] Linux Interview Questions

[Walt Reed]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2007 at 10:10:47PM -0800, Afroze Mohammad said:
> I am a newbie to Linux, just started using Ubuntu. I have an interview 
> tomorrow and they are gonna ask on C & scripting (Perl) on Linux. I have 
> looked up online for linux commands and started reading those from
> http://www.ss64.com/bash/ and http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/cmd/  I am 
> just worried what would be the interview questions on Linux or scripting 
> using Perl on Linux.
> 
> Help would be highly appreciated!

There is no major difference using perl on Linux as there is on Solaris
or mac OS X. Shell scripting can be quite different depending on the
shell used - Bash and C shell have quite different syntax. What flavor
of commands are used (GNU or BSD based) on the particular unix flavor
also has some impact, but bash on Solaris is close enough to bash on
Linux that if you know one, you can work with the other.

Now if you are coming from the world of Windows, your lack of *nix
knowledge is going to be dead obvious. It's like the old Michael Keaton
movie Mr. Mom, where a friend asked him about his electrical wiring
project... "Are you gonna make it all 220?" "Yeah. 220... 221, whatever
it takes."

More over, they are less likely to ask questions like "what does the
chmod command do" and more like "If I have a directory with 2000 files
in it of file names with mixed upper and lower case and spaces, how
would you make them all lower case and strip the spaces?"

Obviously there is more than one possible solution, and some people
would do a it with shell commands, others a one-liner in Perl, but
neither way is difficult - IF you are familiar with shell and perl.
Obviously you can't cram for that kind of question - no amount of
"facts and figures" memorization will help you.