Linux System Administration Tools
Overview
Good system administration starts with knowing what your system is doing. These tools help you monitor performance, manage processes, handle backups, and keep your packages up to date.
Process & Performance Monitoring
top
Real-time view of running processes and system resource usage. Press
q to quit, k to kill a process.ps
Snapshot of current processes.
ps aux shows everything. Pipe to grep: ps aux | grep apache.df / du
df -h shows disk usage per filesystem. du -sh /var/log shows size of a directory.free
free -m shows RAM and swap usage in megabytes. Essential for diagnosing memory pressure.Package Management
# Debian / Corel / Mandrake (apt): # apt-get update # refresh package lists # apt-get install package # install a package # apt-get upgrade # upgrade all packages # Red Hat / Caldera / SuSE (rpm): # rpm -ivh package.rpm # install # rpm -Uvh package.rpm # upgrade # rpm -qa # list all installed packages # rpm -e packagename # remove
Backup Tools
tar
The standard Unix archiving tool.
tar czf backup.tar.gz /home/user creates a compressed archive. tar xzf backup.tar.gz extracts it.rsync
Efficient file synchronisation tool. Only transfers changed bytes.
rsync -avz /home/ backup@server:/backups/.