LinuxQuestions.org - teach me to fish

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teach me to fish

can someone point me in the direction of a list of important system files so i don't have to ask stupid questions like "what is that file with the bash profile?"

i'm sure it exists somewhere, a list with descriptions of files like modules.conf and inittab... if anyone knows of something like this i'd be quite interested. i'm still pretty new and i haven't found a single good linux instructional website yet hardly... maybe a few but the point is i'm past the basics now and i want to become and instant power user.

I am pretty new aswell however I have found that there is alot of "important" files in /etc.

The best way to find things however is to read manuals and use the locate feature read 'man locate'

I second what our Ozzie mate said :)

and also, I think the problem with such
a list would be that it would be hard to
maintain, considering that
a) everybody finds different things important and
b) Things change often between versions
and distributions...

Quote:

"what is that file with the bash profile?"

The best attempt to find an answer to that
would be

Code:

man bash

/FILES

Almost every program that makes use
of configuration files will have this
FILES-section near the end of the man-page
that will give you a brief overview of location
and meaning of the file.

Code:

FILES

      /bin/bash

              The bash executable

      /etc/profile

              The systemwide initialization  file,  executed  for

              login shells

      ~/.bash_profile

              The  personal  initialization  file,  executed  for

              login shells

      ~/.bashrc

              The individual per-interactive-shell startup file

      ~/.bash_logout

              The individual login shell cleanup  file,  executed

              when a login shell exits

      ~/.inputrc

              Individual readline initialization file

Man is your friend, and so is the / (search) ;)

Cheers,
Tink

When I was in the same position as bandofmercy I got an enormous boost in my understanding of Linux by reading the book:

Running Linux, Fourth Edition, published by O'Reilly

Don't forget the famous
http://www.google.com/linux

The most cryptic log entry or filename normally has at least one page somewhere explaining what it means.

As rising_son said most important config files are in /etc and sometimes they have man pages for more information. You can try 'man fstab' and 'man modules.conf' etc...

If it weren't for the ldp I wouldn't be running Linux today.