After adding a company-standard alias to /etc/skel/.bashrc, you check an existing user's account and the alias is absent from their ~/.bashrc. What is the effect of the change you made?
LPIC-1 Exam 102-500, objective 105. Shells and shell scripting easy
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The options
Correct It applies only to accounts created afterwards, because the skeleton is copied when a home directory is created
Correct. useradd copies /etc/skel into the new home directory at creation time. It is a one-off copy, not a link or an overlay.
Not correct It applies to all users at their next login, because bash reads /etc/skel before ~/.bashrc
Wrong. Bash has no knowledge of /etc/skel at all. It is used by the account creation tools, never by the shell.
Not correct It applies to all users immediately, because ~/.bashrc is a symbolic link into /etc/skel
Wrong. The files placed in a new home directory are independent copies owned by the new user, which is what allows users to edit them.
Not correct It applies to nobody until the files in /etc/skel are made executable
Wrong. Startup files are sourced by the shell, not executed as programs, so they need no execute permission; the copy happens regardless of the mode.
Why
/etc/skel is a template directory whose contents, including dotfiles and subdirectories, are copied into a new user's home directory when that directory is created, which means useradd -m or a distribution default such as CREATE_HOME. Existing accounts are never revisited, so a site-wide change that must reach current users belongs in /etc/bash.bashrc or a file in /etc/profile.d instead. useradd -k names an alternative skeleton directory for a single invocation.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- manual page useradd(8)
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 105 and space the ones you get wrong.
More questions on this objective
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