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Shell scripting or programming mostly consists of the features which today’s modern
programming languages offer. We have driven next set of interview questions.

1. How do you terminate a shell script if statement?

With fi, which is “if” spelled backwards.

#!/bin/ksh

myfile=$1

if [ -f $myfile ]

then

echo "$myfile exists"

fi

exit 0

2. What UNIX operating system command would you use to display the shell’s
environment variables?

Running the “env” command will display the shell environment variables.
Details:
Sample env command output:

# env

HISTFILE=/home/lfl/.history

PATH=/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin

SHELL=/bin/ksh
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HOSTNAME=livefirelabs.com

USER=lfl

MAIL=/var/spool/mail/lfl

HOME=/home/lfl

HISTSIZE=1000
It would also be good to understand the purpose of the common shell environment variables
that are listed in the env command output.

3. What code would you use in a shell script to determine if a directory exists?

The UNIX test command with the -d option can be used to determine if a directory exists.
Details:
The following test command expression would be used to verify the existence of a specified
directory, which is stored in the variable $mydir:

if [ -d $mydir ]

then

command(s)

fi
If the value stored in the variable mydir exists and is a directory file, the command(s) located
between then and fi will be executed.

You can consult the test command’s man page (“$ man test”) to see what test command
options are available for use.

4. How do you access command line arguments from within a shell script?

Arguments passed from the command line to a shell script can be accessed within the shell
script by using a $ (dollar sign) immediately followed with the argument’s numeric position on
the command line.

Details:
For example, $1 would be used within a script to access the first argument passed from the
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command line, $2 the second, $3 the third and so on. Bonus: $0 contains the name of the
script itself.

5. How would you use AWK to extract the sixth field from a line of text
containing colon (:) delimited fields that is stored in a variable called
passwd_line?

echo $passwd_line | awk -F: ‘{ print $6 }’

Details:
Consider this line of text stored in the variable $passwd..

# echo $passwd.
mail:x:8:12:mail:/var/spool/mail:

(Background: The lines in the system passwd file are delimited (separated) by a colon
(:)…$passwd_line contains a single line from the passwd file.)

The output of the echo command is piped to AWK. The -f option for the awk command informs
awk of what the field separator is (colon in this example), and print $6 instructs awk to print
the 6th field in the line.

6. What does 2>&1 mean and when is it typically used?

The 2>&1 is typically used when running a command with its standard output redirected to a
file. For example, consider:

command > file 2>&1

Anything that is sent to command’s standard output will be redirected to “file” in this example.

The 2 (from 2>&1) is the UNIX file descriptor used by standard error (stderr). Therefore, 2>&1
causes the shell to send anything headed to standard error to the same place messages to
standard output (1) are sent…which is “file” in the above example.
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To make this a little clearer, the > in between “command” and “file” in the example is
equivalent to 1>.

7. Within a UNIX shell scripting loop construct, what is the difference between
the break and continue?

Using break within a shell scripting loop construct will cause the entire loop to terminate. A
continue will cause the current iteration to terminate, but the loop will continue on the next
iteration.

8. What is the significance of $#?

$# shows the count of the arguments passed to the script.

9. What is the difference between $* and $@?

$@ treats each quoted arguments as separate arguments but $* will consider the entire set of
positional parameters as a single string.

10. Given a file, replace all occurrence of word “ABC” with “DEF” from 5th line
till end in only those lines that contains word “MNO”

sed –n ‘5,$p’ file1|sed ‘/MNO/s/ABC/DEF/’

11. Explain about “s” permission bit in a file?

“s” bit is called “set user id” (SUID) bit.

“s” bit on a file causes the process to have the privileges of the owner of the file during the
instance of the program.

For example, executing “passwd” command to change current password causes the user to
writes its new password to shadow file even though it has “root” as its owner.

12. How can any user find out all information about a specific user like his
default shell, real-life name, default directory, when and how long he has
been using the system?
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finger “loginName” …where loginName is the login name of the

user whose information is expected.

13. What is the difference between $$ and $!?

$$ gives the process id of the currently executing process whereas $! Shows the process id of
the process that recently went into the background.

14. What are zombie processes?

These are the processes which have died but whose exit status is still not picked by the parent
process. These processes even if not functional still have its process id entry in the process
table.

15. What will happen to my current process when I execute a command using
exec?

“exec” overlays the newly forked process on the current process; so when I execute the
command using exec, the command gets executed on the current shell without creating any
new processes.

E.g., Executing “exec ls” on command prompt will execute ls and once ls exits, the process
will shut down

16. What is the difference between grep and egrep?

egrep is Extended grep that supports added grep features like “+” (1 or more occurrence of
a previous character),”?”(0 or 1 occurrence of a previous character) and “|” (alternate
matching)

17. Write a command sequence to find all the files modified in less than 2
days and print the record count of each.

find . –mtime -2 –exec wc –l {} \;

18. What are “c” and “b” permission fields of a file?

“c “ and “b” permission fields are generally associated with a device file. It specifies whether a
file is a special character file or a block special file.

19. How will you abort a shell script before it is successfully executed?

We need to use ‘exit’ command to fulfil the above described situation. A ‘exit’ command when
forced to output any value other than 0 (zero), the script will throw an error and will abort.
The value 0 (zero) under Unix environment shell scripting represents successful execution.
Hence putting ‘exit -1’, without quotes before script termination will abort the script.

For example, create a following shell script as ‘test.sh‘.

#!/bin/bash

echo "Hello"

exit -1

echo "foxutech"
Save the file and execute it.

# sh test.sh

Hello

exit.sh: 3: exit: Illegal number: -1

20. How will you check the length of a line from a text file?

‘sed’ command is used to find or check the length of a line from a text file.

A ‘sed –n ‘n p’ file.txt‘, where ‘n‘ represents the line number and ‘p‘ print out the pattern space
(to the standard output). This command is usually only used in conjunction with the -n
command-line option. So, how to get the length count? Obviously! we need to pipeline the
output with ‘wc‘ command.

# sed –n 'n p' file.txt | wc –c

# sed -n '5 p' foxutech.txt | wc –c

21. If any of a group of staffs working for a company abc. The company ask
you to create a directory ‘dir_abc, such that any member of the group can
create a file or access a file under it, but no one can delete the file, except
the one created it. what will you do?

An interesting scenario to work upon. Well in the above said scenario we need to implement
the below steps which is as easy as cake walk.

# mkdir dir_abc

# chmod g+wx dir_abc

# chmod +t dir_abc
The first line of command create a directory (dir_abc). The second line of command above
allow group (g) to have permission to ‘write‘ and ‘execute‘ and the last line of the above
command – The ‘+t‘ in the end of the permissions is called the ‘sticky bit‘. It replaces the ‘x‘
and indicates that in this directory, files can only be deleted by their owners, the owner of the
directory or the root superuser.

22. Can you tell me the various stages of a Linux process; it passes through?

A Linux process normally goes through four major stages in its processing life.

Here are the 4 stages of Linux process.

Waiting: Linux Process waiting for a resource.

Running: A Linux process is currently being executed.

Stopped: A Linux Process is stopped after successful execution or after receiving kill signal.

Zombie: A Process is said to be ‘Zombie’ if it has stopped but still active in process table.

23. What is the use of cut command in Linux?

A ‘cut’ is a very useful Linux command which proves to be helpful when we need to cut certain
specific part of a file and print it on standard output, for better manipulation when the field of
the file and file itself is too heavy.

For example, extract first 10 columns of a text file ‘txt_foxutech‘.

# cut -c1-10 txt_foxutech

# cut -d;-f2 -f5 -f7 txt_foxutech

24. What is inode? Brief about it.

A ‘inode’ is a ‘data-structure’, which is used for file identification on Linux. Each file on a Unix
System has a separate ‘inode’ and an ‘Unique’ inode Number.

25. How to pass argument to a script?

./script argument
Example: Script will show filename

./show.sh file1.txt

cat show.sh

#!/bin/bash

cat $1

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