Linux Essentials

Linux plays an incredibly important part in the job of a cybersecurity professional. Specialized Linux distributions such as Kali Linux are used by cybersecurity professionals to perform in-depth penetration testing and vulnerability assessments, as well as provide forensic analysis after a security breach.

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Linux is a very popular platform for Cybersecurity professionals, and it’s worthwhile investing time to learn how to navigate the platform, especially from the command line. Unlike on your laptop, you won’t also have a Graphical user interface (GUI) when you’re on the job. It would help if you moved around the OS, download files, extract text from files, read and write from files using only the command line. In addition to that, you want to understand how to use useful tools like grep for extracting information from log files using regular expressions.

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In this workshop, you will learn:

• Core navigation: Use ls, pwd, cd, mkdir, rm; autocomplete with Tab; recall commands with Up Arrow; clear screen with clear.

• File operations: Create with touch, view with cat or less, move/rename/copy with mv/cp, understand . and ...

• Advanced ls options: Long format, human-readable sizes (-lh), hidden files (-a), sorted by size (-lS), single column (-1), multiple directories.

• Downloads and inspection: wget for internet files; head/tail for file ends; wc for counts; sort alphabetically; man for help; cut sections; uniq for uniques.

• Piping (|) chains commands, like grep for pattern matching in logs.

• User/system: whoami, sudo for root, apt update/install packages (apt update, apt install).

• Output control: Redirect with > (overwrite) or >> (append); concatenate files.