LICM study guide
LICM · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The LPI Linux Essentials Certificate (exam code 010) is an entry-level credential from the Linux Professional Institute that establishes that you understand what Linux is, where it fits in the wider open source world, and how to work productively on a Linux system from the command line. It is aimed at people who are new to Linux or who use it incidentally - students, help-desk and junior operations staff, developers moving onto Linux hosts, and career-changers building a foundation before tackling a heavier administration certification. The LICM study guide has 5 sections and about 1,860 words.
01The Linux Community and a Career in Open Source
This domain tests whether you understand where Linux came from, who builds it, and how open source licensing shapes what you may legally do with software. Expect questions on distributions, common applications, IT roles, and the difference between copyleft and permissive licences.
369 words, about 2 min02Finding Your Way on a Linux System
This domain tests command-line literacy: navigating the filesystem, getting help without the internet, and creating or editing files at the shell. It rewards knowing exact syntax and the difference between absolute and relative paths.
372 words, about 2 min03The Power of the Command Line
This domain tests your ability to combine small tools: pipes and redirection, text searching and processing, archiving, and writing a short shell script. truncates and writes stdout to a file, appends, < reads stdin, 2 redirects stderr, 2 &1 merges stderr into stdout, and connects stdout of one command to stdin of the next.
376 words, about 2 min04The Linux Operating System
This domain tests how the system fits together: kernel and user space, hardware devices, the boot sequence, processes, and where files live in the filesystem hierarchy. The kernel manages CPU, memory and devices, and exposes hardware as device files under /dev : /dev/sda is the first disk, /dev/sda1 its first partition, /dev/null discards writes.
348 words, about 2 min05Security and File Permissions
This domain tests account types, the files that define them, and the permission model that protects everything on disk - the highest-yield topic on the exam. root (UID 0) bypasses permission checks.
395 words, about 2 min