[Rawmaterial]

A friend of mine -- who doesn’t know anything about UNIX -- needs to hire a UNIX system administrator, so he asked me to create a test for him to give to his applicants. He said he wanted it to be hard enough to weed out the inexperienced ones.

Here are some of the questions on the test. For those of you with experience managing UNIX boxes, how would you rate the difficulty of these questions? How many can you answer?


1. What effect would running the following string of commands have?
Code:

a) du -k | sort -n | tail -10
b) find /home -perm 4000 -o -perm 2000 -type f -exec rm {} \;
c) cut -f7 -d: /etc/passwd | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
d) ps aux | grep "^mysql" | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9


2. Regarding the string of commands from 1d above...
a) What flavor of UNIX is it?
b) Why is it a bad idea?

3. What does this mean in ~root/.bash_history?
Code:

cd ~/.ssh cp /bin/sh .key1 chown root *1 chmod 4711 *1


4. When does this run?
Code:

30 1,13 * * 0


5. Describe how to send email using dig and telnet.

are these hard questions?

[macdude425]

What exactly will this admin be doing?

Heck, I'd sure fail this test. I know parts of it, but i can't tell you what the whole string does.

Then again, my specialty is Desktop Linux.

[Rawmaterial]

to be honest i am copying and pasting an email from a friend.

[Aphoticom]

These questions should sufficiently weed out inexperienced applicants.

EDIT: However, the applicant should be allowed to miss one.

[Nitestick]

whoa! that should do nicely at weeding out the noobies.

[Deathwalker]

Looks like it should work well.

[M4A1]

Post the solutions? I'm curious =D