🧠 7-Day Learning Plan for Linux Process Management
Linux Process Management is a core skill for system administrators, developers, and power users. This 7-day plan is designed to take you from basic concepts to advanced tools with hands-on practice each day.
🛠️ Requirements
- A Linux system (or WSL, or VirtualBox with Ubuntu)
- Terminal access
- Basic shell command knowledge
📅 Day 1: Process Basics & Identification
- Topics: What is a process, PID, PPID, Foreground/Background, Daemons
- Practice:
ps ps -ef ps aux echo $$ pstree whoami - Tasks: List all running processes, find your shell’s PID, view process tree.
📅 Day 2: Process Creation & Lifecycle
- Topics: fork(), exec(), Process states, Zombies, Orphans
- Practice:
sleep 100 & ps -ef | grep sleep - Tasks: Observe sleep process, create parent-child example.
📅 Day 3: Job Control in Shell
- Topics: &, fg, bg, jobs, CTRL+Z, kill, nohup, disown
- Practice:
sleep 300 & jobs fg %1 bg %1 kill %1 - Tasks: Try stopping, restarting, and killing background jobs.
📅 Day 4: Monitoring and Analyzing Processes
- Topics: top, htop, vmstat, iostat
- Practice:
top htop # install: sudo apt install htop vmstat 1 - Tasks: Identify high CPU/memory processes, real-time analysis.
📅 Day 5: Signals and Process Control
- Topics: Signals (SIGKILL, SIGTERM, SIGHUP), kill, pkill, signal traps
- Practice:
kill -9 <pid> kill -l pkill firefox - Task: Trap SIGINT in a Bash script:
#!/bin/bash
trap "echo 'Caught SIGINT'" SIGINT
while true; do sleep 1; done📅 Day 6: Process Priorities and Scheduling
- Topics: nice, renice, scheduling policies
- Practice:
nice -n 10 sleep 300 & renice -n -5 -p <pid> - Tasks: Change process priority using nice and renice.
📅 Day 7: Daemons, Services & systemd
- Topics: systemd vs init, Managing services, Writing a service
- Practice:
systemctl status ssh systemctl start/stop <service> journalctl -xe - Tasks: Manage at least 3 system services and explore journal logs.
🎁 Bonus Content
- Cheat Sheet: Want a one-page summary in PDF format?
- Script Pack: Example Bash scripts for trapping signals, background tasks
- Quiz: Coming soon! Test your understanding at the end of the week.
Let me know in the comments if you want downloadable resources or mind maps!
🔁 Stay consistent and practice daily. Happy learning Linux!
