// the find
trimstray/test-your-sysadmin-skills
A collection of Linux Sysadmin Test Questions and Answers. Test your knowledge and skills in different fields with these Q/A.
A single-file collection of 284 Linux/Unix sysadmin interview questions with answers, organized by experience level from junior to guru. Aimed at people preparing for ops interviews or wanting to audit gaps in their own knowledge.
Questions span a genuinely wide range — from 'what does ls -al output' to load average internals, RAID levels, and signal semantics, so it covers the actual breadth of what sysadmin interviews test. Answers don't just give you the command; they explain the why (e.g., the /etc/shadow vs /etc/passwd distinction, what SIGKILL vs SIGTERM actually means). Useful external links are attached to most answers so you can go deeper without hunting. The tiered structure (junior/regular/senior/guru) is honest about difficulty and gives you a progression path.
Last meaningfully updated years ago — some answers recommend tools like `netstat` which are deprecated in favor of `ss` on modern systems, and the content doesn't reflect current container/cloud reality that most sysadmin roles now require. A significant number of questions are marked 'to be completed' with no answer, which means you can hit a gap mid-prep with no fallback. Everything lives in one massive README with no search, no tagging, and no way to run yourself through questions interactively — it's a reference doc, not a practice tool. Coverage of modern concerns (systemd beyond basics, cgroups, SELinux/AppArmor, eBPF) is thin to nonexistent.