Which Linux skills matter most for a DevOps engineer?

Summary

Processes and signals, systemd services and logs (journalctl), file permissions and users, package management, networking tools (ip, ss, dig, curl, tcpdump), disk and filesystem management, performance tools (top, vmstat, iostat, free), text processing (grep, awk, sed, jq), SSH and certificates, and an understanding of containers' building blocks (namespaces, cgroups).

Longer Answer

Interviewers often probe with scenarios: a server is slow, a disk is full, a service will not start, a port is not reachable. A good answer shows a methodical workflow (check service status and logs, resources, network listeners, recent changes) rather than memorised commands.

Key Points

• Processes, systemd, permissions.
• Networking and performance tools.
• Text processing and jq.
• Namespaces and cgroups.