Hello Folks!


What's up? Well, it is past 1:30 AM in India and I am reading "Programming Perl by Larry Wall and Ranald L. Schwartz". (I just came to know that AWK and Sed programs can be converted into Perl programs by "a2p" and "s2p" respectively.)

Anyways, coming to the captioned subject, what questions would you ask a candidate appearing for a Unix / Linux interview? Well, you would exclaim that it depends. So, let's assume these categories of their roles:

• System Administrator
• Production / Application Support
• Unix / Linux Programmer
• Network Operations (NOC)
• DBA (Oracle/MySQL)
• System Security

... or what you will.

Hum... What is a bit ?

Okay, this leads me to assume several things:
- you cannot sleep, too much coffee??
- you're nervous in prepping for a job interview. In that case, there are some sites that have such a list...but if it'll help you land a job, dunnow...

At any rate:


Sweet dreams

Thor

Haha!!!! Well, I am already doing a good job. Software Engineer and enjoy working on Unix, Linux, and Bash, and other things that interest me or catch my attention.

Not too much coffee! Just sleep is being very shy mistress to me tonight...!

By the way, I have not appeared in any interview for several months so just wanted to get a feel of it from your you guys' questions.

The smallest unit of measuring the size of a piece of information or anything that can be stored in the computer memory?

Well, why did you not ask "What's a byte?" and I would say 1 Byte = 8 Bits. So easy hm?

Everything you've listed has an entirely different set of skills, with just a small amount to tie them together. The questions will be very diverse, and really, there is NO WAY anyone can know. An interviewer can ask ANYTHING, for ANY reason.

For example (going down your list):

• A systems admin would be expected to know how to configure LVM's, channel bonding, virtual machines, and manage the system resources, along with dealing with backups, etc. But...
• An applications administrator probably won't care about the deep nuts and bolts, but have to know how to manage the APPLICATION, and know when to refer problems up to the admin. But....
• A programmer won't need to know ANY of that, since they'll WRITE the application that the app. administrator runs, on the system managed by the sysadmin. They'll need SOME access, but have VERY different needs. But...
• A NOC person won't care at all...they manage the NETWORK, and will use a system (whatever it is), to manage the switches/routers/etc.
• A DBA will, again, not really care about the OS the system is running, except on a very high level, but only manage the database.
• Systems security is an entire discipline, and will depend on if you mean it as IMPLEMENTING security, or auditing/enforcing it.

The only possible way to be prepared is to be qualified for the job you're interviewing for, and have researched both the company and position beforehand. Otherwise, you'll be easily dismissed.

I just came across this peculiar way of untarring a tar file in the book I stated above:

The original line reads (from the book):


Well, I tried the above method (not exactly the same as this CentOS is not having uncompress utility on it):

So, why would we need to use the "cat *.tar.Z" command in the first place when tar can itself extract the contents of a Tarred file?

TB0ne -> Long time. You are looking at my posts. How are you doing? I am not preparing for any interview. Just posted something in the "General" discussion to see what new could come out of it (the post).

Maybe at the time the book was written, tar had no uncompress ability ?

the compress and .Z files are old, gzip makes better compression afaik

C/C++ on Linux:

Writing and explaining a Makefile.
Debugging tools - Valgrind/GDB.
Autotools.
The compiler options of GCC.

So...you're the guy everyone blames if "the software does'nt work"...poor you, been there...

Eh...she can be a tough lady to get in bed...

Are you doing the interviewing? That means you're looking for "ammo"...hehe...

Anisha! How you doing? Without looking at what you might have posted, I could guess that you would talk about C/C++.

I'd ask if they know how to make a backup!

Let me add some questions from my side too.

[1] How to write a brand new Kernel top of which an entire Unix/Linux OS can run?

[2] How to best address OOM (Out of Memory) incident and catch (alert/email) its very first instance before things get worse?

[3] How to best handle Heap Memory ezceeding a critical thredhold such as 90% without having to add more memory space and by employing some proven or useful methods?

[4] On a Solaris System, where to look for files such as /proc/meminfo and /proc/cpuinfo, etc. that are typically found on a Linux Box under "/proc/" file system? (On my newly installed Solaris OS 10, there are no such files under the pseudo filesystem.)

[5] How can Memory (RAM only) and CPU Utilization or Load Average be referred to when Memory is being 99% utilized and Load Average is very normal, say, under 0.5 (Single CPU, for example)? If the processes/applications are utlizing high memory space then why its impact is not being Load Average?

[6] What is the market trend of developing Kernels and Operating Systems? Are they using C or C++ or Java for writing an OS?

[7] Should "init" or "shutdown" be used for rebooting a Unix/Linux OS? What is the difference between the two commands?

[8] Ours is a Telecom Domain and we write programs targeted for Mobile and Smart devices. Multi-Media contents such as a Video, an Image, or an Audio files that are sent/received, need to be transcoded in order for a handset/device to play/open it. What programming language would you choose for such purposes and why? We are currently using C++ for backend processing of content/MMS. Shall we migrate to Java technologies or some other ones?

[9] Without enhancing your user account's privileges, how would you check as to when the system was last rebooted/shutdown? "uptime" command will not give you the date and time.

[10] How to unlock a file/resource being used by a process in order to copy it or retrieve data from it?

Well, would anybody like to comment on those questions? A tough interviewer! Hm? )

Your question numero uno has me stumped. It would be too difficult to write a kernel that was completely new, yet compatible with a modern user-land app.

Btw, it's 2:49 AM for me over here in India as well (not Delhi tho)