Extracting System Configuration Using Linux Commands

This guide demonstrates how to extract and process system configuration information on a Linux host using standard command‑line tools.

Problem: Save all IP addresses to a file, remove empty lines, count regular files in /bin, copy /etc/inittab to the current directory, and count non‑comment, non‑empty lines in the copied file.

Solution overview: Use ifconfig to capture IP data, grep with appropriate options to filter lines, ls and wc to count files, cp to copy, and a pipeline of grep and wc to count effective configuration lines.

Step 1 – Store IP information: ifconfig > ipadd.txt

Step 2 – Display the file without empty lines: grep -v ^$ ipadd.txt

Step 3 – Count regular files in /bin (excluding shortcuts): ls -l /bin/* | grep ^- | wc -l

Step 4 – Copy /etc/inittab to the current directory as init.txt : cp /etc/inittab init.txt

Step 5 – Count effective configuration lines in init.txt (exclude lines starting with # and empty lines): grep -v ^# init.txt | grep -v ^$ | wc -l

The commands produce the expected outputs, e.g., the ls pipeline returns 94 files and the final count of valid configuration lines is 1 .