the Linux File System explained in 1,233 seconds // Linux for Hackers // EP 2

About this video

Episode 2 of NetworkChuck’s ‘Linux for Hackers’ series is a guided tour of the Linux file system, built around one big idea: in Linux, everything is a file — configuration, devices, and even the commands themselves. Working in a free Hack The Box Academy lab (the series sponsor), he starts at the root directory and walks the main folders: /bin holds the essential command binaries, /sbin holds administrator-only commands (demonstrated by creating a user with adduser), /usr contains near-duplicate bin and sbin directories with more commands plus libraries, games, and a /usr/local spot for commands you create yourself, /boot holds boot files, /var holds logs and web-related files, /tmp holds temporary files, /home holds each regular user’s home, /root is the root user’s separate private home, /dev represents devices as files (he cats the virtual disk vda to prove the point), /etc holds system configuration (he opens the network interfaces file to show IP settings stored as plain text), and /media versus /mnt split automatically mounted drives from manually mounted ones. Along the way he teaches commands in context: whoami, ls, cd, pwd, clear, cat (used to peek inside the ls binary itself), cp and rm (he copies the ls command to a new file, deletes the original, and restores it), sudo for one-command admin privileges, and which to discover that commands actually resolve to /usr/bin. He closes by naming the layout the File System Hierarchy (FHS) and assigning flashcard homework plus a quiz challenge.

Key takeaways

• The organizing principle of Linux: everything is a file — settings, devices like hard drives, and even commands such as ls are binary files you can inspect with cat.
• Know the map: /bin and /sbin for essential and admin commands, /usr for the larger command set and libraries, /etc for configuration, /dev for devices, /home for users, and /root for the root user’s private home.
• sudo runs a single command with root/admin privileges — the fix when cp or rm returns ‘permission denied’ in system directories.
• The ‘which’ command reveals where a command actually lives (here, /usr/bin), resolving the confusion of duplicate bin directories in / and /usr.
• /media is where the system auto-mounts drives like USB sticks, while /mnt is for drives you mount manually.

Episode details: published April 9, 2021 · 20:33 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are NetworkChuck’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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