Practice Labs

Your first Linux adventure. Navigate the filesystem using only the terminal. Find your home directory, check today's date, and look up the manual page for a command you've never used before. By the end you'll feel comfortable moving around a Linux system.

You'll practice: pwd, cd, ls, date, whoami, man

A treasure hunt across the Linux filesystem. Find four specific files without being told where they are: the one listing all user accounts, the one controlling DNS resolution, your CPU information, and the system hostname. Teaches you to navigate with purpose and to know where real Linux systems keep their config.

You'll practice: find, grep, cat, /etc knowledge, /proc filesystem

Build a real project structure from scratch. Create a directory called project, make subdirectories for src, docs, and tests, drop some sample files in each, then copy the whole structure to a backup folder. Tests your understanding of the core file management commands.

You'll practice: mkdir, touch, cp -r, mv, tree

Create a shared project directory with layered access. The owner gets full control, group members can read and execute but not write, and everyone else is locked out completely. You'll learn octal permission notation (755, 750, 700) by doing it by hand.

You'll practice: chmod, chown, ls -l, octal notation

Create a shell script with nano, run it, then reopen the same file in vim and add a new line. This lab teaches you both major Linux editors side by side so you'll be comfortable using either one on any system you log into.

You'll practice: nano, vim, chmod +x, running shell scripts

You're handed a mystery. Someone's messing with the system, and the evidence is scattered across several log files in /var/log. Use grep, tail, sort, and uniq to find how many failed login attempts there are, which user is being targeted, and when the activity started.

You'll practice: grep, tail -f, sort, uniq -c, log file analysis

Write your first real shell script — one that takes an argument, checks if it's a directory, and prints a summary of what's inside. Introduces variables, conditionals, and command substitution.

You'll practice: shebang line, $1, if/fi, $(...), echo

A runaway process is eating your CPU. Find it using top, read its PID, and kill it. Learn the difference between a polite kill and a force kill -9. Practice reading process lists and filtering them with ps aux | grep.

You'll practice: top, ps aux, kill, kill -9, process signals