Command Line Tools for System Administration

Those who come from the Unix world are (or at least, should be) accustomed to opening up plain text configuration files and working with them. Those who come from the Windows world probably aren't. Even though many people who administer Windows systems started off with MS-DOS, it's most likely only a distant memory for them. Windows system administrators should be aware that Linux system administration means getting back to doing things in text mode with text editors. Does that mean that there is no way to do it in graphic mode? Absolutely not. As we mentioned before, there exist GUI tools for this. But anybody who's used a Linux system for some time knows that, on one hand, command line tools can be very efficient and extremely fast if you're proficient with them. On the other hand, there may be cases where you can't run graphic tools on a particular system. And let's face it, the fact that you can deal with plain text configuration implies that you have a greater understanding of what's going on. This will come in handy at some point when you've got a large problem that needs to be solved.