File

Description

/boot/vmlinuz

The Linux kernel file.  File naming conventions may include release information

/dev/fd0

Device file for the first floppy disk drive on the system

/dev/fd0H1440

Device driver for the first floppy drive in high density mode, commonly invoked when formatting a floppy diskette for that density

/dev/hda

Device file for the first IDE hard drive on the system

/dev/hdc

Commonly, the IDE CDROM drive device file which often is a symbolic link called to /dev/cdrom, the real CDROM driver file.

/dev/null

A dummy device which contains nothing.  It is sometimes useful to send output to this device to make it go away forever.

/etc/aliases

Contains aliases used by sendmail and other mail transport agents. Whenever this file is changed, the newaliases utility must be run to notify sendmail of the changes

/etc/bashrc

Contains global defaults and aliases used by the bash shell

/etc/crontab

A parent shell script to run commands periodically.  It invokes hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly scripts.

/etc/exports

Contains a list of filesystems which may be made available to other systems on the network via NFS.

/etc/fstab

The file system table contains the description of what disk devices are available at what mount points.

/etc/group

Holds information regarding security group definitions.

/etc/grub.conf

The grub boot loader configuration file

/etc/hosts

Contains host names and their corresponding IP addresses used for name resolution whenever a DNS server is unavailable

/etc/hosts.allow

Contains a list of hosts allowed to access services on this computer.

/etc/hosts.deny

Contains a list of hosts forbidden to access services on this computer.

/etc/inittab

Describes how the INIT process should set up the system in various runlevels

/etc/issue

Contains the pre-login message, often overwritten by the /etc/rc.d/rc.local script in Red Hat and some other rpm-based Linux distributions

/etc/lilo.conf

The lilo boot loader configuration file

/etc/modules.conf

Holds options for configurable system modules

/etc/motd

This is the ”message of the day” file which is printed upon login. It can be overwritten by /etc/rc.d/rc.local Red Hat on startup.

/etc/mtab

Status information for currently mounted devices and partitions

/etc/passwd

Contains information regarding registered system users. Passwords are typically kept in a shadow file for better security.

/etc/printcap

Holds printer setup information

/etc/profile

Contains global defaults for the bash shell

/etc/resolv.conf

A list of domain name servers (DNS) used by the local machine

/etc/securetty

This file contains a list of terminals where root can login

/etc/termcap

An extensive ASCII text file defining the properties of consoles, terminals, and printers

/proc/cpuinfo

Contains CPU related information

/proc/filesystems

Holds information regarding filesystems that are currently in use

/proc/interrupts

Stores the interrupts that are currently being used

/proc/ioports

A list of the I/O addresses used by devices connected to the server

/proc/meminfo

Contains memory usage information for both physical memory and swap

/proc/modules

Lists currently loaded kernel modules

/proc/mounts 

Displays currently mounted file systems

/proc/stat

Contains various statistics about the system, such as the number of page faults since the system was last booted

/proc/swaps

Holds swap file utilization information

/proc/version

Contains Linux version information

/var/log/lastlog

Stores information about the last boot process

/var/log/messages

Contains messages produced by the syslog daemon during the boot process

/var/log/wtmp

A binary data file holding login time and duration for each user currently on the system