Important questions: Chapter 1 1.Explain Unix operating system and its functions. 2.

Explain a brief history about unix OS. 3.How do you login a session with unix? 4. Explain the commands: date, banner, tput, tput clear, cal, who, ps, ls, wc, exit with examples. 5. What is the option that has to be given to who command to print its Header? 6. Explain wc command with its options and an example. 7. Explain how the unix os was created. 8. Explain the movement of LINUX and GNU Chapter 2 1.Explain the UNIX architecture 2. Explain the features of unix 3. Explain posix and the single unix specification 4. Explain type and whereis commands 5. Explain the path 6. What is an internal and external command? Explain with an example each 7. Explain UNIX command structure. 8. Explain flexibility of command usage 9. Explain man structure by taking wc as an example 10. If you see a command use (2 hyphens), then which flavor of Unix could you be using? 11. Explain type, echo, cat, man, apropos, whatis commands with an example 12. What are the pager commands of UNIX? How are they used in man pages? Explain 13. what is ls -a used for? 14. What is ls -lat used for? Chapter 3 1. Explain the following commands with an example and different options cal, calendar, date, echo, printf, bc, script, passwd, who, uname, tty, stty, 2. what is the output of cal 01 2011 3. how can you make use of pager commands to cal? 4. Explain different date options. Also write a shell script to display appropriate messages according to the hour got by date command. 5. How can you make out which shell you are working in, what is your home directory, what is the path. 6. Using (text based calculator of UNIX) bc do some basic arithmetic calculations. 7. Explain how you can record a session using the script command. 8. Explain how you can change your password. Say for example for a user 1mca21. Also explain the password framing rules. 9. What is the output of uname -r, uname -n? 10. How can you restore sanity of the terminal?

Chapter 4: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Explain the 3 different files in brief. Explain whats in a filename. Explain the parent child relationship with a neat diagram Explain how you see what is the home directory. Explain the commands pwd, mkdir, cd, rmdir what is the difference between absolute path name and a relative pathname what does the command rm -rf do? What is a inode number? Explain how files and directories are created and removed wrt inode number. 9. Explain the usage of . And .. in relative pathnames. 10. Explain the ls command and its options. 11. Explain the 7 columnar output of ls -l command. 12. Explain the unix file system. Chapter 5: 1. Explain cat command and its options. 2. Explain how you can make use of cat command for creating a file. 3. Explain cp, mv and rm commands and all of its options. 4. Explain how a director is affected by cp mv and rm commands wrt inode number. 5. Explain paging output 6. explain the navigation and search features that we can make use in man command 7. explain less pager. 8. Explain lp command with an example. 9. What is the output of file a.c? 10. Explain wc command and explain how you can count the number of characters of first line of a file a.c? 11. Explain od command. 12. Explain cmp, comm and diff command by taking appropriate examples. 13. Explain tar command. How can create a tar archive? How can you extract it and view it? Chapter 6: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Explain the command ls -l properly. Explain the -d option of ls command What is the file ownership and group ownership of a file? What are the file permissions available wrt a file in UNIX? What is the command used to change the file permissions? What is a relative permission and what is an absolute permission? What are the security implications of chmod command? How do you change file ownership? Explain with an example. How do you change group ownership? Explain with an example

Chapter 7: 1. Explain the vi editor basics

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

explain the different modes of vi editor with a neat diagram Explain how you can create a file a.c using vi editor and input text into the file? Explain the input mode commands. Explain the ex mode commands How can you escape to the unix shell? Explain the save and exit commands of ex mode. Explain navigation, word navigation, line extremes navigation, absolute movement features of vi editor 9. explain the scrolling features of vi editor 10. explain how you can edit text, delete text and move text in vi editor. 11. Explain y and p of vi editor 12. explain how to join lines in vi editor 13. Explain undo commands 14. Explain how to search for a pattern using vi editor 15. Explain the search and replace feature of vi editor chapter 8 1. Explain the various activities performed by the shell in its interpretive cycle. 2. Explain a line each for the different types of shells. 3. Explain the different wild cards of the shell 4. how can you match the dot? 5. Why do we make use of escaping? 6. Explain how differently the echo command works with quotes. 7. Explain the three standard files in brief. 8. Explain standard input 9. explain standard output 10. explain standard error 11. explain the 2 special files of UNIX based distros 12. Explain the tee command with an example 13. explain command substitution with an example. 14. Explain the shell variables. Chapter 9: 1. Explain process basics 2. Explain parents and children wrt a process 3. what is the output of ps -f? 4. What is the option to be given to display the processes of an user? 5. How do you display system processes? 6. Explain the process creation mechanism 7. Explain how the shell is created 8. explain internal and external commands 9. explain process states and zombies 10. How can you run a job in background? 11. How can you get a background job to foreground? 12. What is the difference between & and nohup command? 13. What does the nice command do? 14. Explain kill command

15. Explain job control 16. How can you execute jobs later? 17. How can you run jobs periodically using the cron command? Chapter 10: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. What are environment variables? With an example explain some of the common environment variables. What is an alias? Write some meaningful aliases for cp, rm and mv commands explain born and korn shell command history What are the history variables? Explain the .profile file. Explain the different initialization scripts of shells

Chapter 11 1. what is an inode number? 2. What is a hard link? How do you create them? 3. Where to use hard links? 4. What is a soft link? How do you create them? 5. What is the reason to use soft links when we already had hard links? 6. What are the differences between a hard link and a soft link? 7. What is a dangling soft link? 8. Explain umask command 9. explain touch command 10. Explain find command chapter 12 1. how can you paginate files? 2. Explain pr command and its different options 3. explain head and tail commands with its different options 4. explain cut command 5. What does the option -c do wrt a cut command? 6. Write a shell program to compare 2 files for common file permissions 7. How do paste files? 8. How can you order files? Explain its different options 9. How can you display repeated and nonrepeated lines in a text? 10. How can you convert lower case to upper case for the file contents? Chapter 13: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. what is the syntax of grep command? Explain the different options of grep command when do you make use of -e option while using grep command? Explain BRE. What is a character class? Explain the * metacharacter. Explain 2 symbols through which we can specify pattern location

8. When do metacharacters lose their meaning? 9. What are ERE? 10. Can you make use just grep command(without any option) to search wrt an ERE? 11. What is sed? Explain the syntax of sed command 12. what are the 2 types of addressing wrt a sed command? 13. How can you write selected lines to a file using sed command? 14. Explain different text editing commands of sed command 15. Explain how you can delete lines containing a specific pattern using the sed command 16. Explain the best feature of sed command(Ans: substitution). Explain how you can search and substitute director with member. 17. Explain interval regular expression. 18. Explain the internal commands used by sed Chapter 14: 1. what is a shell script or a shell program? 2. How do you execute a shell script? 3. How do you make your shell scripts interactive? 4. Explain the command line arguments. 5. Explain the special parameters used by the shell (Important: tab 14.1 page 275) 6. Explain the exit status of a command 7. Explain the logical operators that can be used in shell programming 8. Explain the if control flow loop. 9. How can you evaluate expressions using the test condition? 10. Write a shell script to read 4 values and do numeric comparisons on them. 11. Explain the numerical comparison operators used by test 12. Explain the string tests used by test 13. explain the file tests used by test 14. write a menu driven program for listing files, listing processes of users, today's date, users of system and in the end to quit 15. Explain expr command with an example. Explain how you can do numeric computation with it. And also how string handling is done with expr command. 16. Explain how you can find the length of a string making use of expr command 17. Explain while loop. 18. How can you loop with a list? 19. Explain the set and shift command by taking date as the argument of set command. 20. Explain the here document taking an example of sending a mail to mark 21. explain the trap command 22. explain how debugging shell scripts can be done with set -x Chapter 15 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. what are the administrator's privileges? How can you set the date as root? Explain the usage of wall command Explain the command ulimit what is the use of set-user-id or suid? What is a sticky bit? Explain Explain how you can add a user using useradd command

8. Explain the startup and shutdown process 9. Explain the df and du commands 10. Explain the command that is used as a backup program 11. Explain the tape archive program Chapter 18 1. Explain the syntax of awk command 2. what is the default delimiter of awk command? 3. What is the default action of awk command? 4. What is -F option used for wrt awk command? 5. Explain how you can split a line into fields 6. How is the built in variable NR used as? 7. Explain how you can make use of printf for formatting output and also number processing 8. Explain how you can create variables in a awk file and make use of it in an expression 9. Explain the comparison operators 10. explain the regular expression operators 11. Explain how number comparison can be done wrt awk 12. With a neat table explain each comparison and regular expression matching operators 13. When is -f option used in the case of an awk command? 14. Explain the BEGIN and END positional parameters 15. With a neat table explain all the built in variables used by awk 16. Explain with a neat table all the built in functions of awk 17. Explain control flow with if, for and while statements 18. write a shell script to calculate gross salary (lab program) Chapter 20 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Explain how you can make use of different Vi editor operators with an example for each Explain what happens as in 4dd, 5cc, 7yy what is the command to change the a current line till the end? Write a neat table and explain the operators (d,y,c,! (filter)) commands Explain how can you switch files using ex mode. Explain with a command how you can insert a file content in a file explain how you can enter the date output to a file. What are named buffers? How many buffers are present in Vi editor? How do you make use of named buffers? 9. Explain how you move text from one file to another. 10. What are numbered buffers? How many numbered buffers are present in Vi editor? How do you make use of them? 11. Explain the way in which we can enter a control character in your file thro vi editor. 12. Explain some of the set command options. (tab 20.4 page 442) Chapter 21: 1. 2. 3. 4. What is a sub-shell? Explain sub-shell and current shell with an example Explain the export command Explain how you can execute the .profile file using the .command

5. 6. 7. 8.

What is parameter substitution? Explain the +, - and = option. Explain how to merge streams making use of redirection. What is a shell function? Create a s hell function for ls Explain how evaluation is done twice with the eval command.

Last but not the least... All the very best.. and one small joke before ending... Explain how do you count the number of occurrences of the word explain Take care and do great... Ananth Sir :)