Access a shell prompt and issue commands with correct syntax

While preparing for RHCE RHEL 6 (available upto March 31, 2016), I came across this website which does an easy to follow cheat sheet of sort for each topics under the RHCE/RHCSA Exam objectives. I was hugely impressed and wanted to do something similar. This is my attempt at creating a cheat sheet for RHCE/RHCSA RHEL 7.

Now to the topic. Anyone attempting RHCE should already know how to launch a terminal to access the shell and run commands. If you are really that fresh to Linux, among the many many resources available online I recommend Daniel Robin’s Linux Fundamental series and Introduction to Linux by the Linux Foundation at EdX.

In the real world, you are very likely to access Linux servers remotely using ssh. Who runs GUI on Linux servers? Unless you are working for a cool company you are stuck with Windows on the laptop and almost everyone around you are likely to use PuTTy ssh client. I use MobaXterm for many reasons one being multi tab support.

Let me guess further. It will be a virtual machine running on VMware ESXi. If your company has embraced public cloud, it will be an Amazon EC2 or Rackspace. There is a good chance you will not deal with a lot Linux physical servers.

A bit of history and early experience- Before ssh came along, the standard way to access remote Unix server was telnet. As a student in NIIT (once upon a time a popular computer training institution in India), I used telnet client in Windows NT workstation to access the lone Linux ( Red Hat 6) server in the center. Telnet! Because that was in the book. It was terrible because the terminal emulation was so so bad. For example, if you hit backspace, some charactes will appear instead. I often wonder why NIIT didn’t show us the ssh way. OpenSSH was already available and apparently shipping with Red Hat Linux 6. I got to use ssh only after I started working, my second job in 2004 at CSS Corps which was called SlashSupport in Chennai.