LPI Updated 102-500 Exam Questions and Answers by orson

The locale setting of the operating system is a set of environmental variables that defines the language, country, and character encoding settings (or any other special variant preferences) for the applications and shell session on a Linux system12. The locale setting usually consists of at least a language code and a country/region code, such as en_US for English (United States) or fr_FR for French (France). The locale setting also affects things such as the currency symbol, the thousands separator, the decimal point, the date and time format, the collation order, the paper size, the telephone number format, and many other values formatted in accordance with the language or region/country12. However, the timezone is not contained in the locale setting of the operating system. The timezone is a separate setting that determines the local time of the system based on the offset from the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and the daylight saving time (DST) rules. The timezone can be different from the country/region code in the locale setting, for example, a user can have a locale setting of en_US but a timezone of Asia/Kolkata. The timezone can be viewed and modified by using the date, timedatectl, or tzselect commands . References: 12

The best way to temporarily suspend a single user’s ability to interactively login is to use the chage command to expire the user account. The chage command can modify the expiration date of a user account, which is stored in the /etc/shadow file. By setting the expiration date to a past date, the user account will be locked and the user will not be able to login. This method is temporary because the expiration date can be changed again to a future date or removed to unlock the user account. For example, to expire the user account linuxconfig, we can use the following command:

# chage -E 0 linuxconfig

This will set the expiration date to January 1, 1970, which is the epoch date. To check the expiration date of a user account, we can use the -l option:

# chage -l linuxconfig

Last password change : Aug 24, 2021

Password expires : never

Password inactive : never

Account expires : Jan 01, 1970

Minimum number of days between password change : 0

Maximum number of days between password change : 99999

Number of days of warning before password expires : 7

To remove the expiration date of a user account, we can use the -E option with an empty argument:

# chage -E "" linuxconfig

The other options are either invalid or not recommended. Adding the user name to /etc/nologin will not work, because /etc/nologin is a file that contains a message to be displayed to users who try to login when the system is down for maintenance. Changing the user’s password is not a good idea, because it will affect the user’s authentication and may cause security issues. Changing the user name in /etc/passwd will also affect the user’s authentication and may cause inconsistencies with other files and services. Placing the command logout in the user’s profile will not prevent the user from logging in, but only log them out immediately after login, which is not very elegant or secure. References: 1: How to disable user login with Linux nologin - LinuxConfig.org 2: Disable a user’s login without disabling the account - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange 3: How to Block or Disable Normal User Logins in Linux? - GeeksforGeeks 4: How to Disable User Logins on Linux | Baeldung on Linux 5: How to Disable a User in Linux - Linux Nightly 6: How to deactivate or disable a user account in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS - Vitux 7: chage(1) - Linux manual page

Each entry in a crontab file consists of six fields, specifying in the following order: minute, hour, day, month, weekday, and command1. Any of these fields can be set to an asterisk (*), which stands for “first through last.” So, for example, to run a job every hour, put * in the hour field1. Each entry in a crontab file must end with a newline character (\n), which indicates the end of a line2. A newline character is created by pressing the Enter key on the keyboard. The other options are not valid characters for ending a crontab entry. A tab or a space is used to separate each field, and a backslash is used to escape special characters or continue a long command to the next line2. References:

How to Use the Cron Job Format to Schedule Task in Linux

Syntax of crontab File Entries - Oracle.

 The LC_MESSAGES environment variable specifies the language to use in diagnostic messages for an internationalized program. It can be set to any value supported by the installation, such as pt for Portuguese, en for English, fr for French, etc. The LC_MESSAGES variable can be set either globally in a shell profile file, such as /etc/bash_profile, or locally in a shell session. For example, to set the language of messages to Portuguese for the current shell session, one can use the following command:

export LC_MESSAGES=pt

To verify the change, one can run an internationalized program, such as man, and see the output in Portuguese. The LC_MESSAGES variable can also be used to run a single command with a different language without affecting the system’s language. For example, to run the man command with the Spanish language, one can use the following syntax:

LC_MESSAGES=es man

The LC_MESSAGES variable is useful for testing how programs behave in different languages or for displaying messages in different languages1234. References:

Locale Environment Variables in Linux | Baeldung on Linux

Linux / UNIX: TZ Environment Variable - nixCraft

Changing your locale on Linux and UNIX systems - IBM

Selecting message language in gcc and g++ - Stack Overflow