LFCS study guide
LFCS · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS) is a vendor-neutral, performance-based certification that validates practical Linux administration skill rather than multiple-choice recall. It suits intermediate-level practitioners - system administrators, DevOps and support engineers - who already work comfortably at a shell and want a credential that is not tied to a single distribution. The LFCS study guide has 5 sections and about 1,566 words.
01Operations and Deployment
systemd manages services and boot state. Know the difference between a unit being active now and enabled at boot: systemctl start runs it, systemctl enable creates the boot-time links, and systemctl enable --now does both.
306 words, about 2 min02Networking
Modern Linux networking questions usually expect ip and ss , not legacy ifconfig and netstat . Understand the layers: a link/interface has an address, routing decides where packets go, and DNS resolves names.
313 words, about 2 min03Storage
Know the storage stack: block devices appear under /dev , partitions or LVM logical volumes sit on them, filesystems are created with mkfs , and mounts attach filesystems to the directory tree. lsblk , blkid , and df -h are core inspection commands; du -sh finds directory usage.
313 words, about 2 min04Essential Commands
Essential command questions reward precision with paths, globs, options, and redirection. Know file operations ( cp , mv , rm , mkdir -p , touch , ln ), text search ( grep -r , -i , -n , -v ), and file search ( find ).
310 words, about 2 min05Users and Groups
Linux account data lives in /etc/passwd , /etc/shadow , /etc/group , and /etc/gshadow . /etc/passwd is world-readable and holds the username, UID, primary GID, home directory, and shell; /etc/shadow holds password hashes and aging fields and should not be world-readable.
324 words, about 2 min