Command Line Proficiency and Troubleshooting Questions
Comfortable using shell commands for system troubleshooting and administration. Key tools: ps (process information), top and htop (real-time monitoring), grep, sed, awk (text processing), curl (HTTP requests), netstat and ss (network statistics), du and df (disk usage), kill and killall (process termination), tar and gzip (compression). Know how to redirect I/O, pipe commands together, and create simple scripts. Understand how to use man pages.
MediumBehavioral
0 practiced
Behavioral: Describe a time (or hypothetically describe) when you used CLI tools during an on-call incident to collaborate with developers and operations to resolve a production issue. Focus on the specific commands or scripts you ran, how you communicated findings, and how you turned the CLI evidence into changes that prevented recurrence.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Write an awk command to compute the top 10 most requested API endpoints by count from an nginx access log in combined format. Provide the pipeline starting from cat/access log path and include sorting and limiting steps. Mention how you'd adapt it to exclude health-check endpoints like /live or /metrics.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
You are triaging a service that returns intermittent 502/503 to users. From a single host's CLI, list the minimal sequence of commands (ps/top/ss/netstat/curl/journalctl/df/du) and the order you'd run them to collect useful debugging data within 10 minutes. Explain why you chose that order and what evidence each command provides.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Create a small, well-documented shell function to retry a given command up to N times with exponential backoff and jitter. The function should accept the command as arguments, the max retries, and a base delay. Provide the function in bash and explain how it handles exit codes and signal propagation.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Write a one-liner (or short pipeline) that finds the largest 10 regular files under /var, correctly handles spaces and newlines in filenames, excludes /var/lib/docker and /var/run, and prints sizes in human-readable form sorted descending. Explain each tool and flag you used.
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