Hands-on guide series
Storage, Text and Your First Scripts: A Hands-On Guide
A nine-part, hands-on guide to disks and filesystems, tar, the text tools sed, awk, cut, sort and uniq, and writing your first bash script and scheduled backup. Every command run on a live Ubuntu server.
What you will build
Security is layers, not a switch. Each part closes a different category of attack, from the automated sweep that finds a brand-new server, to the day one gets in anyway. Read them in order, or jump to what you need.
- 1
Disks and PartitionsMap the linux disks on an Ubuntu 24.04 server: run lsblk to list the disk and its partitions, then df to see how much space is left.6 min - 2
Filesystems, Mounts and fstabLearn linux mount and fstab on Ubuntu 24.04: how mount attaches a partition to a directory, findmnt shows what is mounted, and fstab makes it stick.7 min - 3
Disk Usage: df and duMaster linux disk usage with df and du on Ubuntu 24.04: df shows free space per filesystem, du shows what fills a directory so you find the culprit.6 min - 4
tar and CompressionLearn linux tar and compression on Ubuntu 24.04: use tar to bundle a directory into one archive, gzip to shrink it, then list and extract it.6 min - 5
Text Processing With sedUse the linux sed command on Ubuntu 24.04 to find and replace text as it streams past, editing a log from a script without opening an editor.6 min - 6
Text Processing With awkUse the linux awk command on Ubuntu 24.04 to read text as columns: pull specific fields from a log or CSV and add them up into the numbers you need.6 min - 7
cut, sort, uniq and trCombine linux cut, sort and uniq in a pipe on Ubuntu 24.04 to count how often each value appears in a file, the pattern behind many one-liners.6 min - 8
Your First Bash ScriptA bash script tutorial for Ubuntu 24.04: write your first script with a shebang, a variable and a condition, make it executable, and run it.7 min - 9
Scheduling an Automated BackupWrite a linux backup script and a cron entry on Ubuntu 24.04 so a directory is archived every night on its own, tying the whole series together.7 min