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How to use and follow the exercises

Most of the exercises in this site are designed so that you repeat what is presented in the text. The exercises are not explicitly labelled in most cases but there's always an instruction for you what to do. Therefore, it's important that you carefully read everything and not skip anything.

Command-line examples

The command-line examples are designed so that you can repeat them on your own, and in fact, it's highly recommended that you do so. Majority of the exercises are based on you repeating what is shown in the text and seeing it for yourself in action.

It's highly recommended that you type each command by hand instead of copying and pasting them. We believe that this makes it easier to learn what is presented in the exercises. On the other hand, the code examples are something that should be fine to copy and paste.

Here's an example of a command-line exercise.

# List /etc files in Ubuntu in Docker
$ docker run --rm ubuntu:20.04 ls -l /etc
total 260
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root    3028 Nov  6 01:21 adduser.conf
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root    4096 Nov  6 01:25 alternatives
drwxr-xr-x. 1 root root    4096 Nov  6 01:21 apt
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root    2319 Feb 25  2020 bash.bashrc
...

Here's what each line in the example means:

  • Lines starting with # sign are comments within the examples to point out details. In the example above, we point out what the command below it does.
  • Lines starting with $ are the actual command-line commands that are run. These are something you can repeat yourself in your environment.
  • The rest of the lines are demonstrate the output of the command above it. Note that the example output doesn't always fully align with what you run due to small differences in the environments the commands are run it.
  • Lines with ... are used for signalling that there's more output from the above command but that it's cut off. It's usually used for cutting out output that's not relevant to the exercise.

Freestyle exercises

There's a few exercises where you're tasked to freely experiment with what you learned in the earlier exercises. These are considered bonus exercises: You can spend any amount of time you feel like on them.

Reminders

There's a few reminders scattered in the docs. Here's what they look like.

Note

I'm a note. I'm used for drawing your attention to a detail you may have missed.

Warning

I'm a warning. I'm used for drawing your attention to a detail that might cause issues later, if you miss it.

Danger

I'm a danger warning. I'm used for drawing your attention to a detail that may cause serious issues later, if you miss it.