A Practical Guide to Red Hat® Linux® 8

Chapter Summary

This chapter defines a system administrator as someone who keeps the system useful and convenient for its users and describes some of that person's tasks and tools. This chapter describes many of the files and programs you will work with to maintain a Red Hat system. Certain programs and files control how the system appears; many of these files are located in the /etc directory. Much of the work you do as the system administrator requires you to log in as root. The chapter describes the special privileges of the root user (called Superuser) and various ways of gaining these privileges. When you are logged in as Superuser, you have extensive systemwide powers that you do not normally have. You can read from and write to any file ...