Linux Fundamentals, Part 2


Before You Start

About this tutorial

Welcome to "Basic administration," the second of four tutorials designed to prepare you for the Linux Professional Institute's 101 exam. In this tutorial, we'll show you how to use regular expressions to search files for text patterns. Next, we'll introduce you to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS), and then show you how to locate files on your system. Then, we'll show you how to take full control of Linux processes by running them in the background, listing processes, detaching processes from the terminal, and more. Next, we'll give you a whirlwind introduction to shell pipelines, redirection, and text processing commands. Finally, we'll introduce you to Linux kernel modules.

This particular tutorial (Part 2) is ideal for those who have a good basic knowledge of bash and want to receive a solid introduction to basic Linux administration tasks. If you are new to Linux, we recommend that you complete Part 1 of this tutorial series first before continuing. For some, much of this material will be new, but more experienced Linux users may find this tutorial to be a great way of "rounding out" their basic Linux administration skills.


Regular Expressions

What is a regular expression?

A regular expression (also called a "regex" or "regexp") is a special syntax used to describe text patterns. On Linux systems, regular expressions are commonly used to find patterns of text, as well as to perform search-and-replace operations on text streams.

Glob comparison

As we take a look at regular expressions, you may find that regular expression syntax looks similar to the filename "globbing" syntax that we looked at in Part 1. However, don't let this fool you; their similarity is only skin deep. Both regular expressions and filename globbing patterns, while they may look similar, are fundamentally different beasts.

The simple substring

With that caution, let's take a look at the most basic of regular expressions, the simple substring. To do this, we're going to use grep, a command that scans the contents of a file for a particular regular expression. grep prints every line that matches the regular expression, and ignores every line that doesn't:

$ grep bash /etc/passwd

Above, the first parameter to grep is a regex; the second is a filename. grep read each line in /etc/passwd and applied the simple substring regex bash to it, looking for a match. If a match was found, grep printed out the entire line; otherwise, the line was ignored.

Understanding the simple substring

In general, if you are searching for a substring, you can just specify the text verbatim without supplying any "special" characters. The only time you'd need to do anything special would be if your substring contained a +, ., *, [, ], or \, in which case these characters would need to be enclosed in quotes and preceded by a backslash. Here are a few more examples of simple substring regular expressions:

  • /tmp (scans for the literal string /tmp)
  • "\[box\]" (scans for the literal string [box])
  • "\*funny\*" (scans for the literal string *funny*)
  • "ld\.so" (scans for the literal string


With regular expressions, you can perform much more complex searches than the examples we've looked at so far by taking advantage of metacharacters. One of these metacharacters is the . (a period), which matches any single character:

$ grep dev.sda /etc/fstab
/dev/sda3       /               reiserfs        noatime,ro 1 1
/dev/sda1       /boot           reiserfs        noauto,noatime,notail 1 2
/dev/sda2       swap            swap            sw 0 0
#/dev/sda4      /mnt/extra      reiserfs        noatime,rw 1 1

In this example, the literal text dev.sda didn't appear on any of the lines in /etc/fstab. However, grep wasn't scanning them for the literal dev.sda string, but for the dev.sda pattern. Remember that the . will match any single character. As you can see, the . metacharacter is functionally equivalent to how the ? metacharacter works in "glob" expansions.

Using []

If we wanted to match a character a bit more specifically than ., we could use [ and ] (square brackets) to specify a subset of characters that should be matched:

$ grep dev.sda[12] /etc/fstab
/dev/sda2       swap            swap            sw 0 0

As you can see, this particular syntactical feature works identically to the [] in "glob" filename expansions. Again, this is one of the tricky things about learning regular expressions -- the syntax is similar but not identical to "glob" filename expansion syntax, which often makes regexes a bit confusing to learn.

Using [^]

You can reverse the meaning of the square brackets by putting a ^ immediately after the [. In this case, the brackets will match any character that is not listed inside the brackets. Again, note that we use [^] with regular expressions, but [!] with globs:

$ grep dev.sda[^12] /etc/fstab
/dev/sda3       /               reiserfs        noatime,ro 1 1

Differing syntax

It's important to note that the syntax inside square brackets is fundamentally different from that in other parts of the regular expression. For example, if you put a . inside square brackets, it allows the square brackets to match a literal ., just like the 1 and 2 in the examples above. In comparison, a literal . outside the square brackets is interpreted as a metacharacter unless prefixed by a \. We can take advantage of this fact to print a list of all lines in /etc/fstab that contain the literal string dev.sda by typing:

$ grep dev[.]sda /etc/fstab

Alternately, we could also type:

$ grep "dev\.sda" /etc/fstab

Neither regular expression is likely to match any lines in your /etc/fstab file.

The "*" metacharacter

Some metacharacters don't match anything in themselves, but instead modify the meaning of a previous character. One such metacharacter is * (asterisk), which is used to match zero or more repeated occurrences of the previous character. Note that this means that the * has a different meaning in a regex than it does with globs. Here are some examples, and play close attention to instances where these regex matches differ from globs:

  • ab*c matches abbbbc but not abqc (if a glob, it would match both strings -- can you figure out why?)
  • ab*c matches abc but not abbqbbc (again, if a glob, it would match both strings)
  • ab*c matches ac but not cba (if a glob, ac would not be matched, nor would cba)
  • b[cq]*e matches bqe and be (if a glob, it would match bqe but not be)
  • b[cq]*e matches bccqqe but not bccc (if a glob, it would match the first but not the second as well)
  • b[cq]*e matches bqqcce but not cqe (if a glob, it would match the first but not the second as well)
  • b[cq]*e doesn't match bbbeee (this would not be the case with a glob)
  • .* will match any string. (if a glob, it would match any string starting with .)
  • foo.* will match any string that begins with foo (if a glob, it would match any string starting with the four literal characters foo..)

Now, for a quick brain-twisting review: the line ac matches the regex ab*c because the asterisk also allows the preceding expression (b) to appear zero times. Again, it's critical to note that the * regex metacharacter is interpreted in a fundamentally different way than the * glob character.

Beginning and end of line

The last metacharacters we will cover in detail here are the ^ and $ metacharacters, used to match the beginning and end of line, respectively. By using a ^ at the beginning of your regex, you can cause your pattern to be "anchored" to the start of the line. In the following example, we use the ^# regex to match any line beginning with the # character:

$ grep ^# /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.

Full-line regexes

^ and $ can be combined to match an entire line. For example, the following regex will match a line that starts with the # character and ends with the . character, with any number of other characters in between:

$ grep '^#.*\.$' /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.

In the above example, we surrounded our regular expression with single quotes to prevent $ from being interpreted by the shell. Without the single quotes, the $ will disappear from our regex before grep even has a chance to take a look at it.

FHS and finding files

Filesystem Hierarchy Standard

The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard is a document that specifies the layout of directories on a Linux system. The FHS was devised to provide a common layout to simplify distribution-independent software development -- so that stuff is in generally the same place across Linux distributions. The FHS specifies the following directory tree (taken directly from the FHS specification):

  • / (the root directory)
  • /boot (static files of the boot loader)
  • /dev (device files)
  • /etc (host-specific system configuration)
  • /lib (essential shared libraries and kernel modules)
  • /mnt (mount point for mounting a filesystem temporarily)
  • /opt (add-on application software packages)
  • /sbin (essential system binaries)
  • /tmp (temporary files)
  • /usr (secondary hierarchy)
  • /var (variable data)

The two independent FHS categories

The FHS bases its layout specification on the idea that there are two independent categories of files: shareable vs. unshareable, and variable vs. static. Shareable data can be shared between hosts; unshareable data is specific to a given host (such as configuration files). Variable data can be modified; static data is not modified (except at system installation and maintenance).

The following grid summarizes the four possible combinations, with examples of directories that would fall into those categories. Again, this table is straight from the FHS specification:

|         | shareable       | unshareable |
|static   | /usr            | /etc        |
|         | /opt            | /boot       |
|variable | /var/mail       | /var/run    |
|         | /var/spool/news | /var/lock   |

Secondary hierarchy at /usr

Under /usr you'll find a secondary hierarchy that looks a lot like the root filesystem. It isn't critical for /usr to exist when the machine powers up, so it can be shared on a network (shareable), or mounted from a CD-ROM (static). Most Linux setups don't make use of sharing /usr, but it's valuable to understand the usefulness of distinguishing between the primary hierarchy at the root directory and the secondary hierarchy at /usr.

This is all we'll say about the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. The document itself is quite readable, so you should go take a look at it. You'll understand a lot more about the Linux filesystem if you read it. Find it at

Finding files

Linux systems often contain hundreds of thousands of files. Perhaps you are savvy enough to never lose track of any of them, but it's more likely that you will occasionally need help finding one. There are a few different tools on Linux for finding files. This introduction will help you choose the right tool for the job.


When you run a program at the command line, bash actually searches through a list of directories to find the program you requested. For example, when you type ls, bash doesn't intrinsically know that the ls program lives in /usr/bin. Instead, bash refers to an environment variable called PATH, which is a colon-separated list of directories. We can examine the value of PATH:

$ echo $PATH

Given this value of PATH (yours may differ,) bash would first check /usr/local/bin, then /usr/bin for the ls program. Most likely, ls is kept in /usr/bin, so bash would stop at that point.

Modifying PATH

You can augment your PATH by assigning to it on the command line:

$ PATH=$PATH:~/bin
$ echo $PATH

You can also remove elements from PATH, although it isn't as easy since you can't refer to the existing $PATH. Your best bet is to simply type out the new PATH you want:

$ PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:~/bin
$ echo $PATH

To make your PATH changes available to any future processes you start from this shell, export your changes using the export command:

$ export PATH

All about "which"

You can check to see if there's a given program in your PATH by using which. For example, here we find out that our Linux system has no (common) sense:

$ which sense
which: no sense in (/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin)

In this example, we successfully locate ls:

$ which ls

"which -a"

Finally, you should be aware of the -a flag, which causes which to show you all of the instances of a given program in your PATH:

$ which -a ls


If you're interested in finding more information than purely the location of a program, you might try the whereis program:

$ whereis ls
ls: /bin/ls /usr/bin/ls /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz

Here we see that ls occurs in two common binary locations, /bin and /usr/bin. Additionally, we are informed that there is a manual page located in /usr/share/man. This is the man-page you would see if you were to type man ls.

The whereis program also has the ability to search for sources, to specify alternate search paths, and to search for unusual entries. Refer to the whereis man-page for further information.


The find command is another handy tool for your toolbox. With find you aren't restricted to programs; you can search for any file you want, using a variety of search criteria. For example, to search for a file by the name of README, starting in /usr/share/doc:

$ find /usr/share/doc -name README

find and wildcards

You can use "glob" wildcards in the argument to -name, provided that you quote them or backslash-escape them (so they get passed to find intact rather than being expanded by bash). For example, we might want to search for README files with extensions:

$ find /usr/share/doc -name README\*
[578 additional lines snipped]

Ignoring case with find

Of course, you might want to ignore case in your search:

$ find /usr/share/doc -name '[Rr][Ee][Aa][Dd][Mm][Ee]*'

Or, more simply:

$ find /usr/share/doc -iname readme\*

As you can see, you can use -iname to do case-insensitive searching.

find and regular expressions

If you're familiar with regular expressions, you can use the -regex option to limit the output to filenames that match a pattern. And similar to the -iname option, there is a corresponding -iregex option that ignores case in the pattern. For example:

$ find /etc -iregex '.*xt.*'

Note that unlike many programs, find requires that the regex specified matches the entire path, not just a part of it. For that reason, specifying the leading and trailing .* is necessary; purely using xt as the regex would not be sufficient.

find and types

The -type option allows you to find filesystem objects of a certain type. The possible arguments to -type are b (block device), c (character device), d (directory), p (named pipe), f (regular file), l (symbolic link), and s (socket). For example, to search for symbolic links in /usr/bin that contain the string vim:

$ find /usr/bin -name '*vim*' -type l

find and mtimes

The -mtime option allows you to select files based on their last modification time. The argument to mtime is in terms of 24-hour periods, and is most useful when entered with either a plus sign (meaning "after") or a minus sign (meaning "before"). For example, consider the following scenario:

$ ls -l ?
-rw-------    1 root     root            0 Jan  7 18:00 a
-rw-------    1 root     root            0 Jan  6 18:00 b
-rw-------    1 root     root            0 Jan  5 18:00 c
-rw-------    1 root     root            0 Jan  4 18:00 d
$ date
Mon Jan  7 18:14:52 EST 2003

You could search for files that were created in the past 24 hours:

$ find . -name \? -mtime -1

Or you could search for files that were created prior to the current 24-hour period:

$ find . -name \? -mtime +0

The -daystart option

If you additionally specify the -daystart option, then the periods of time start at the beginning of today rather than 24 hours ago. For example, here is a set of files created yesterday and the day before:

$ find . -name \? -daystart -mtime +0 -mtime -3
$ ls -l b c

The -size option

The -size option allows you to find files based on their size. By default, the argument to -size is 512-byte blocks, but adding a suffix can make things easier. The available suffixes are b (512-byte blocks), c (bytes), k (kilobytes), and w (2-byte words). Additionally, you can prepend a plus sign ("larger than") or minus sign ("smaller than").

For example, to find regular files in /usr/bin that are smaller than 50 bytes:

$ find /usr/bin -type f -size -50c

Processing found files

You may be wondering what you can do with all these files that you find! Well, find has the ability to act on the files that it finds by using the -exec option. This option accepts a command line to execute as its argument, terminated with ;, and it replaces any occurrences of {} with the filename. This is best understood with an example:

$ find /usr/bin -type f -size -50c -exec ls -l '{}' ';'
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           27 Oct 28 07:13 /usr/bin/krdb
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           35 Nov 28 18:26 /usr/bin/run-nautilus
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           25 Oct 21 17:51 /usr/bin/sgmlwhich
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           26 Sep 26 08:00 /usr/bin/muttbug

As you can see, find is a very powerful command. It has grown through the years of UNIX and Linux development. There are many other useful options to find. You can learn about them in the find manual page.


We have covered which, whereis, and find. You might have noticed that find can take a while to execute, since it needs to read each directory that it's searching. It turns out that the locate command can speed things up by relying on an external database generated by updatedb (which we'll cover in the next panel.)

The locate command matches against any part of a pathname, not just the file itself. For example:

$ locate bin/ls

Using updatedb

Most Linux systems have a "cron job" to update the database periodically. If your locate returned an error such as the following, then you will need to run updatedb as root to generate the search database:

$ locate bin/ls
locate: /var/spool/locate/locatedb: No such file or directory
$ su -
# updatedb

The updatedb command may take a long time to run. If you have a noisy hard disk, you will hear a lot of racket as the entire filesystem is indexed. :)


On many Linux distributions, the locate command has been replaced by slocate. There is typically a symbolic link to locate, so that you don't need to remember which you have. slocate stands for "secure locate." It stores permissions information in the database so that normal users can't pry into directories they would otherwise be unable to read. The usage information for slocate is essentially the same as for locate, although the output might be different depending on the user running the command.

Process Control

Staring xeyes


You may need to install xeyes on your system first. Consult your distro's documentation for instructions on installing

To learn about process control, we first need to start a process. Make sure that you have X running and execute the following command:

$ xeyes -center red

You will notice that an xeyes window pops up, and the red eyeballs follow your mouse around the screen. You may also notice that you don't have a new prompt in your terminal.

Stopping a process

To get a prompt back, you could type Control-C (often written as Ctrl-C or ^C):

You get a new bash prompt, but the xeyes window disappeared. In fact, the entire process has been killed. Instead of killing it with Control-C, we could have just stopped it with Control-Z:

$ xeyes -center red
[1]+  Stopped                 xeyes -center red

This time you get a new bash prompt, and the xeyes windows stays up. If you play with it a bit, however, you will notice that the eyeballs are frozen in place. If the xeyes window gets covered by another window and then uncovered again, you will see that it doesn't even redraw the eyes at all. The process isn't doing anything. It is, in fact, "Stopped."

fg and bg

To get the process "un-stopped" and running again, we can bring it to the foreground with the bash built-in fg:

$ fg
(test it out, then stop the process again)
[1]+  Stopped                 xeyes -center red

Now continue it in the background with the bash built-in bg:

$ bg
[1]+ xeyes -center red &

Great! The xeyes process is now running in the background, and we have a new, working bash prompt.

Using "&"

If we wanted to start xeyes in the background from the beginning (instead of using Control-Z and bg), we could have just added an "&" (ampersand) to the end of xeyes command line:

$ xeyes -center blue &
[2] 16224

Multiple background processes

Now we have both a red and a blue xeyes running in the background. We can list these jobs with the bash built-in jobs:

$ jobs -l
[1]- 16217 Running                 xeyes -center red &
[2]+ 16224 Running                 xeyes -center blue &

The numbers in the left column are the job numbers bash assigned when they were started. Job 2 has a + (plus) to indicate that it's the "current job," which means that typing fg will bring it to the foreground. You could also foreground a specific job by specifying its number; for example, fg 1 would make the red xeyes the foreground task. The next column is the process id or pid, included in the listing courtesy of the -l option to jobs. Finally, both jobs are currently "Running," and their command lines are listed to the right.

Introducing signals

To kill, stop, or continue processes, Linux uses a special form of communication called "signals." By sending a certain signal to a process, you can get it to terminate, stop, or do other things. This is what you're actually doing when you type Control-C, Control-Z, or use the bg or fg built-ins -- you're using bash to send a particular signal to the process. These signals can also be sent using the kill command and specifying the pid (process id) on the command line:

$ kill -s SIGSTOP 16224
$ jobs -l
[1]- 16217 Running                 xeyes -center red &
[2]+ 16224 Stopped (signal)        xeyes -center blue

As you can see, kill doesn't necessarily "kill" a process, although it can. Using the "-s" option, kill can send any signal to a process. Linux kills, stops or continues processes when they are sent the SIGINT, SIGSTOP, or SIGCONT signals respectively. There are also other signals that you can send to a process; some of these signals may be interpreted in an application-dependent way. You can learn what signals a particular process recognizes by looking at its man-page and searching for a SIGNALS section.


If you want to kill a process, you have several options. By default, kill sends SIGTERM, which is not identical to SIGINT of Control-C fame, but usually has the same results:

$ kill 16217
$ jobs -l
[1]- 16217 Terminated              xeyes -center red

The big kill

Processes can ignore both SIGTERM and SIGINT, either by choice or because they are stopped or somehow "stuck." In these cases it may be necessary to use the big hammer, the SIGKILL signal. A process cannot ignore SIGKILL:

$ kill 16224
$ jobs -l
$ kill -s SIGKILL
$ jobs -l
[2]+ 16224 Interrupt               xeyes -center blue


The terminal where you start a job is called the job's controlling terminal. Some shells (not bash by default), will deliver a SIGHUP signal to backgrounded jobs when you logout, causing them to quit. To protect processes from this behavior, use the nohup when you start the process:

$ nohup make &
[1] 15632
$ exit

Using ps to list processes

The jobs command we were using earlier only lists processes that were started from your bash session. To see all the processes on your system, use ps with the a and x options together:

$ ps ax
    1 ?        S      0:04 init [3]
    2 ?        SW     0:11 [keventd]
    3 ?        SWN    0:13 [ksoftirqd_CPU0]
    4 ?        SW     2:33 [kswapd]
    5 ?        SW     0:00 [bdflush]

I've only listed the first few because it is usually a very long list. This gives you a snapshot of what the whole machine is doing, but is a lot of information to sift through. If you were to leave off the ax, you would see only processes that are owned by you, and that have a controlling terminal. The command ps x would show you all your processes, even those without a controlling terminal. If you were to use ps a, you would get the list of everybody's processes that are attached to a terminal.

Seeing the forest and the trees

You can also list different information about each process. The --forest option makes it easy to see the process hierarchy, which will give you an indication of how the various processes on your system interrelate. When a process starts a new process, that new process is called a "child" process. In a --forest listing, parents appear on the left, and children appear as branches to the right:

$ ps x --forest
  927 pts/1    S      0:00 bash
 6690 pts/1    S      0:00  \_ bash
26909 pts/1    R      0:00      \_ ps x --forest
19930 pts/4    S      0:01 bash
25740 pts/4    S      0:04  \_ vi processes.txt

The "u" and "l" ps options

The u or l options can also be added to any combination of a and x in order to include more information about each process:

$ ps au
agriffis   403  0.0  0.0  2484   72 tty1     S     2001   0:00 -bash
chouser    404  0.0  0.0  2508   92 tty2     S     2001   0:00 -bash
root       408  0.0  0.0  1308  248 tty6     S     2001   0:00 /sbin/agetty 3
agriffis   434  0.0  0.0  1008    4 tty1     S     2001   0:00 /bin/sh /usr/X
chouser    927  0.0  0.0  2540   96 pts/1    S     2001   0:00 bash
$ ps al
100  1001   403     1   9   0  2484   72 wait4  S    tty1       0:00 -bash
100  1000   404     1   9   0  2508   92 wait4  S    tty2       0:00 -bash
000     0   408     1   9   0  1308  248 read_c S    tty6       0:00 /sbin/ag
000  1001   434   403   9   0  1008    4 wait4  S    tty1       0:00 /bin/sh
000  1000   927   652   9   0  2540   96 wait4  S    pts/1      0:00 bash

Using top

If you find yourself running ps several times in a row, trying to watch things change, what you probably want is top. top displays a continuously updated process listing, along with some useful summary information:

$ top
 10:02pm  up 19 days,  6:24,  8 users,  load average: 0.04, 0.05, 0.00
75 processes: 74 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:  1.3% user,  2.5% system,  0.0% nice, 96.0% idle
Mem:   256020K av,  226580K used,   29440K free,       0K shrd,    3804K buff
Swap:  136544K av,   80256K used,   56288K free                  101760K cached

  628 root      16   0  213M  31M  2304 S       0  1.9 12.5  91:43 X
26934 chouser   17   0  1272 1272  1076 R       0  1.1  0.4   0:00 top
  652 chouser   11   0 12016 8840  1604 S       0  0.5  3.4   3:52 gnome-termin
  641 chouser    9   0  2936 2808  1416 S       0  0.1  1.0   2:13 sawfish


Each processes has a priority setting that Linux uses to determine how CPU timeslices are shared. You can set the priority of a process by starting it with the nice command:

$ nice -n 10 oggenc /tmp/song.wav

Since the priority setting is called nice, it should be easy to remember that a higher value will be nice to other processes, allowing them to get priority access to the CPU. By default, processes are started with a setting of 0, so the setting of 10 above means oggenc will readily give up the CPU to other processes. Generally, this means that oggenc will allow other processes to run at their normal speed, regardless of how CPU-hungry oggenc happens to be. You can see these niceness levels under the NI column in the ps and top listings above.


The nice command can only change the priority of a process when you start it. If you want to change the niceness setting of a running process, use renice:

$ ps l 641
000  1000   641     1   9   0  5876 2808 do_sel S    ?          2:14 sawfish
$ renice 10 641
641: old priority 0, new priority 10
$ ps l 641
000  1000   641     1   9  10  5876 2808 do_sel S    ?          2:14 sawfish

Text processing

Redirection revisited

Earlier in this tutorial series, we saw an example of how to use the > operator to redirect the output of a command to a file, as follows:

$ echo "firstfile" > copyme

In addition to redirecting output to a file, we can also take advantage of a powerful shell feature called pipes. Using pipes, we can pass the output of one command to the input of another command. Consider the following example:

$ echo "hi there" | wc
      1       2       9

The | character is used to connect the output of the command on the left to the input of the command on the right. In the example above, the echo command prints out the string "hi there" followed by a linefeed. That output would normally appear on the terminal, but the pipe redirects it into the wc command, which displays the number of lines, words, and characters in its input.

A pipe example

Here is another simple example:

$ ls -s | sort -n

In this case, ls -s would normally print a listing of the current directory on the terminal, preceding each file with its size. But instead we've piped the output into sort -n, which sorts the output numerically. This is a really useful way to find large files in your home directory!

The following examples are more complex, but they demonstrate the power that can be harnessed using pipes. We're going to throw out some commands we haven't covered yet, but don't let that slow you down. Concentrate instead on understanding how pipes work so you can employ them in your daily Linux tasks.

The decompression pipeline

Normally to decompress and untar a file, you might do the following:

$ bzip2 -d linux-2.4.16.tar.bz2
$ tar xvf linux-2.4.16.tar

The downside of this method is that it requires the creation of an intermediate, uncompressed file on your disk. Since tar has the ability to read directly from its input (instead of specifying a file), we could produce the same end-result using a pipeline:

$ bzip2 -dc linux-2.4.16.tar.bz2 | tar xvf -

Woo hoo! Our compressed tarball has been extracted and we didn't need an intermediate file.

A longer pipeline

Here's another pipeline example:

$ cat myfile.txt | sort | uniq | wc -l

We use cat to feed the contents of myfile.txt to the sort command. When the sort command receives the input, it sorts all input lines so that they are in alphabetical order, and then sends the output to uniq. uniq removes any duplicate lines (and requires its input to be sorted, by the way,) sending the scrubbed output to wc -l. We've seen the wc command earlier, but without command-line options. When given the -l option, it only prints the number of lines in its input, instead of also including words and characters. You'll see that this pipeline will print out the number of unique (non-identical) lines in a text file.

Try creating a couple of test files with your favorite text editor and use this pipeline to see what results you get.

The text processing whirlwind begins

Now we embark on a whirlwind tour of the standard Linux text processing commands. Because we're covering a lot of material in this tutorial, we don't have the space to provide examples for every command. Instead, we encourage you to read each command's man page (by typing man echo, for example) and learn how each command and it's options work by spending some time playing with each one. As a rule, these commands print the results of any text processing to the terminal rather than modifying any specified files. After we take our whirlwind tour of the standard Linux text processing commands, we'll take a closer look at output and input redirection. So yes, there is light at the end of the tunnel :)

echo prints its arguments to the terminal. Use the -e option if you want to embed backslash escape sequences; for example echo -e "foo\nfoo" will print foo, then a newline, and then foo again. Use the -n option to tell echo to omit the trailing newline that is appended to the output by default.

cat will print the contents of the files specified as arguments to the terminal. Handy as the first command of a pipeline, for example, cat foo.txt | blah.

sort will print the contents of the file specified on the command line in alphabetical order. Of course, sort also accepts piped input. Type man sort to familiarize yourself with its various options that control sorting behavior.

uniq takes an already-sorted file or stream of data (via a pipeline) and removes duplicate lines.

wc prints out the number of lines, words, and bytes in the specified file or in the input stream (from a pipeline). Type man wc to learn how to fine-tune what counts are displayed.

head prints out the first ten lines of a file or stream. Use the -n option to specify how many lines should be displayed.

tail prints out the last ten lines of a file or stream. Use the -n option to specify how many lines should be displayed.

tac is like cat, but prints all lines in reverse order; in other words, the last line is printed first.

expand converts input tabs to spaces. Use the -t option to specify the tabstop.

unexpand converts input spaces to tabs. Use the -t option to specify the tabstop.

cut is used to extract character-delimited fields from each line of an input file or stream.

The nl command adds a line number to every line of input. Useful for printouts.

pr is used to break files into multiple pages of output; typically used for printing.

tr is a character translation tool; it's used to map certain characters in the input stream to certain other characters in the output stream.

sed is a powerful stream-oriented text editor. You can learn more about sed in the following Funtoo articles:

If you're planning to take the LPI exam, be sure to read the first two articles of this series.

awk is a handy line-oriented text-processing language. To learn more about awk, read the following Funtoo articles:

od is designed to transform the input stream into a octal or hex "dump" format.

split is a command used to split a larger file into many smaller-sized, more manageable chunks.

fmt will reformat paragraphs so that wrapping is done at the margin. These days it's less useful since this ability is built into most text editors, but it's still a good one to know.

paste takes two or more files as input, concatenates each sequential line from the input files, and outputs the resulting lines. It can be useful to create tables or columns of text.

join is similar to paste, but it uses a field (by default the first) in each input line to match up what should be combined on a single line.

tee prints its input both to a file and to the screen. This is useful when you want to create a log of something, but you also want to see it on the screen.

Whirlwind over! Redirection

Similar to using > on the bash command line, you can also use < to redirect a file into a command. For many commands, you can simply specify the filename on the command line, however some commands only work from standard input.

Bash and other shells support the concept of a "herefile." This allows you to specify the input to a command in the lines following the command invocation, terminating it with a sentinal value. This is easiest shown through an example:

$ sort <<END

In the example above, we typed the words apple, cranberry and banana, followed by "END" to signify the end of the input. The sort program then returned our words in alphabetical order.

Using >>

You would expect >> to be somehow analogous to <<, but it isn't really. It simply means to append the output to a file, rather than overwrite as > would. For example:

$ echo Hi > myfile
$ echo there. > myfile
$ cat myfile

Oops! We lost the "Hi" portion! What we meant was this:

$ echo Hi > myfile
$ echo there. >> myfile
$ cat myfile

Much better!

Kernel Modules

Meet "uname"

The uname command provides a variety of interesting information about your system. Here's what is displayed on my development workstation when I type uname -a which tells the uname command to print out all of its information in one swoop:

$ uname -a
Linux inventor 2.4.20-gaming-r1 #1 Fri Apr 11 18:33:35 MDT 2003 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2100+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

More uname madness

Now, let's look at the information that uname provides

info. option                    arg     example
kernel name                     -s      "Linux"
hostname                        -n      "inventor"
kernel release                  -r      "2.4.20-gaming-r1"
kernel version                  -v      "#1 Fri Apr 11 18:33:35 MDT 2003"
machine                         -m      "i686"
processor                       -p      "AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2100+"
hardware platform               -i      "AuthenticAMD"
operating system                -o      "GNU/Linux"

Intriguing! What does your uname -a command print out?

The kernel release

Here's a magic trick. First, type uname -r to have the uname command print out the release of the Linux kernel that's currently running.

Now, look in the /lib/modules directory and --presto!-- I bet you'll find a directory with that exact name! OK, not quite magic, but now may be a good time to talk about the significance of the directories in /lib/modules and explain what kernel modules are.

The kernel

The Linux kernel is the heart of what is commonly referred to as "Linux" -- it's the piece of code that accesses your hardware directly and provides abstractions so that regular old programs can run. Thanks to the kernel, your text editor doesn't need to worry about whether it is writing to a SCSI or IDE disk -- or even a RAM disk. It just writes to a filesystem, and the kernel takes care of the rest.

Introducing kernel modules

So, what are kernel modules? Well, they're parts of the kernel that have been stored in a special format on disk. At your command, they can be loaded into the running kernel and provide additional functionality.

Because the kernel modules are loaded on demand, you can have your kernel support a lot of additional functionality that you may not ordinarily want to be enabled. But once in a blue moon, those kernel modules are likely to come in quite handy and can be loaded -- often automatically -- to support that odd filesystem or hardware device that you rarely use.

Kernel modules in a nutshell

In sum, kernel modules allow for the running kernel to enable capabilities on an on-demand basis. Without kernel modules, you'd have to compile a completely new kernel and reboot in order for it to support something new.


To see what modules are currently loaded on your system, use the lsmod command:

# lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by    Tainted: PF
vmnet                  20520   5
vmmon                  22484  11
nvidia               1547648  10
mousedev                3860   2
hid                    16772   0  (unused)
usbmouse                1848   0  (unused)
input                   3136   0  [mousedev hid usbmouse]
usb-ohci               15976   0  (unused)
ehci-hcd               13288   0  (unused)
emu10k1                64264   2
ac97_codec              9000   0  [emu10k1]
sound                  51508   0  [emu10k1]
usbcore                55168   1  [hid usbmouse usb-ohci ehci-hcd]

Modules listing

As you can see, my system has quite a few modules loaded. the vmnet and vmmon modules provide necessary functionality for VMWare Workstation, which allows me to run a virtual PC in a window on my desktop. The "nvidia" module comes from NVIDIA corporation and allows me to use my high-performance 3D-accelerated graphics card under Linux whilst taking advantage of its many neat features.

Then I have a bunch of modules that are used to provide support for my USB-based input devices -- namely "mousedev," "hid," "usbmouse," "input," "usb-ohci," "ehci-hcd" and "usbcore." It often makes sense to configure your kernel to provide USB support as modules. Why? Because USB devices are "plug and play," and when you have your USB support in modules, then you can go out and buy a new USB device, plug it in to your system, and have the system automatically load the appropriate modules to enable that device. It's a handy way to do things.

Third-party modules

Rounding out my list of modules are "emu10k1," "ac97_codec," and "sound," which together provide support for my SoundBlaster Audigy sound card.

It should be noted that some of my kernel modules come from the kernel sources themselves. For example, all the USB-related modules are compiled from the standard Linux kernel sources. However, the nvidia, emu10k1 and VMWare-related modules come from other sources. This highlights another major benefit of kernel modules -- allowing third parties to provide much-needed kernel functionality and allowing this functionality to "plug in" to a running Linux kernel. No reboot necessary.

depmod and friends

In my /lib/modules/2.4.20-gaming-r1/ directory, I have a number of files that start with the string "modules.":

$ ls /lib/modules/2.4.20-gaming-r1/modules.*

These files contain some lots of dependency information. For one, they record *dependency* information for modules -- some modules require other modules to be loaded first before they will run. This information is recorded in these files.

How you get modules

Some kernel modules are designed to work with specific hardware devices, like my "emu10k1" module which is for my SoundBlaster Audigy card. For these types of modules, these files also record the PCI IDs and similar identifying marks of the hardware devices that they support. This information can be used by things like the "hotplug" scripts (which we'll take a look at in later tutorials) to auto-detect hardware and load the appropriate module to support said hardware automatically.

Using depmod

If you ever install a new module, this dependency information may become out of date. To make it fresh again, simply type depmod -a. The depmod program will then scan all the modules in your directories in /lib/modules and freshen the dependency information. It does this by scanning the module files in /lib/modules and looking at what are called "symbols" inside the modules.

Locating kernel modules

So, what do kernel modules look like? For 2.4 kernels, they're typically any file in the /lib/modules tree that ends in ".o". To see all the modules in /lib/modules, type the following:

# find /lib/modules -name '*.o'
[listing "snipped" for brevity]

insmod vs. modprobe

So, how does one load a module into a running kernel? One way is to use the insmod command and specifying the full path to the module that you wish to load:

# insmod /lib/modules/2.4.20-gaming-r1/kernel/fs/fat/fat.o
# lsmod | grep fat
fat                    29272   0  (unused)

However, one normally loads modules by using the modprobe command. One of the nice things about the modprobe command is that it automatically takes care of loading any dependent modules. Also, one doesn't need to specify the path to the module you wish to load, nor does one specify the trailing ".o".

rmmod and modprobe in action

Let's unload our "fat.o" module and load it using modprobe:

# rmmod fat
# lsmod | grep fat
# modprobe fat
# lsmod | grep fat
fat                    29272   0  (unused)

As you can see, the rmmod command works similarly to modprobe, but has the opposite effect -- it unloads the module you specify.

Your friend modinfo and modules.conf

You can use the modinfo command to learn interesting things about your favorite modules:

# modinfo fat
filename:    /lib/modules/2.4.20-gaming-r1/kernel/fs/fat/fat.o
description: <none>
author:      <none>
license:     "GPL"

And make special note of the /etc/modules.conf file. This file contains configuration information for modprobe. It allows you to tweak the functionality of modprobe by telling it to load modules before/after loading others, run scripts before/after modules load, and more.

modules.conf gotchas

The syntax and functionality of modules.conf is quite complicated, and we won't go into its syntax now (type man modules.conf for all the gory details), but here are some things that you *should* know about this file.

For one, many distributions generate this file automatically from a bunch of files in another directory, like /etc/modules.d/. For example, Gentoo Linux has an /etc/modules.d/ directory, and running the update-modules command will take every file in /etc/modules.d/ and concatenate them to produce a new /etc/modules.conf. Therefore, make your changes to the files in /etc/modules.d/ and run update-modules if you are using Gentoo. If you are using Debian, the procedure is similar except that the directory is called /etc/modutils/.

Summary and Resources


Congratulations; you've reached the end of this tutorial on basic Linux administration! We hope that it has helped you to firm up your foundational Linux knowledge. Please join us in our next tutorial covering intermediate administration, where we will build on the foundation laid here, covering topics like the Linux permissions and ownership model, user account management, filesystem creation and mounting, and more. And remember, by continuing in this tutorial series, you'll soon be ready to attain your LPIC Level 1 Certification from the Linux Professional Institute.


Speaking of LPIC certification, if this is something you're interested in, then we recommend that you study the following resources, which have been carefully selected to augment the material covered in this tutorial:

There are a number of good regular expression resources on the 'net. Here are a couple that we've found:

Be sure to read up on the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard at

Check out the other articles in this series:


You can learn more about sed in the Sed by Example article series. If you're planning to take the LPI exam, be sure to read the first two articles of this series.

To learn more about awk, read the Awk by Example article series.

If you're not too familiar with the vi editor, I strongly recommend that you check out my Vi -- the cheat sheet method tutorial. This tutorial will give you a gentle yet fast-paced introduction to this powerful text editor. Consider this must-read material if you don't know how to use vi.

Next >>>

Read the next article in this series: Linux Fundamentals, Part 3


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