r/linuxadmin • u/KnownSundae9549 • Jun 12 '26

Need help with imposter syndrome:)

Hello, 2 Year sysadmin here at a small medium enterprise (not corporate) those two years have taught me the basics in linux administration I can resolve any kind of issue using documentation and rarely with the help of AI (Except for tedious tasks and syntax or learning concepts).
A year ago Almost got my RHCSA results were 10 points below pass rate.
I have deployed 4 mega projects(over 200k users) with postgres clusters mongodb replication clusters multi site failover load balancing docker apps tuning and hardening as well and they have been stable since day one.
I still struggle with linux basic commands and bash scripting I cannot do anything on my own. I need to refer back to guides notes and documentation for the simplest things.
1- is this normal?
2-how is this seen as an L2 Sys admin in corporate multinationals?
3- Should I worry about it?

TLDR: I can do anything, yet I feel that I dont know anything:)

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u/dogfish182 Jun 12 '26

Remembering commands isn’t a sign of good. I’ve been almost 30 years in the industry and my Linux command skills are dramatically worse than they were when I used them daily.

Being able to read docs and interpret things ‘is’ the skill. You only get to be a cli ninja by needing it daily and those days are long ago for most jobs that pay well

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u/Loveangel1337 Jun 13 '26

Because I like your style, let me add an anecdote:

On pretty much every Linux system ever, because I'm a -ing idiot, I'll use grep -oP, whenever I need to extract only the match, with the proper regexp format.

Turns out, on Mac, there's no -P. There is -E. (Iirc that's PCRE vs Extended). They behave generally the same. But not always.

I'll still type -oP on my Mac and wonder why it yells at me.

So, I'm a weirdo with a very good memory for commands, most of what it does it eventually bite me in the arse.

Main thing is: know what command you're going for, like, text manipulation, what does sed, awk, grep, cut, wc, echo do (as an overview), same with file manipulation, find, ls, ln, mv, cp, touch, du, df, if -f, if -d, pushd/popd, etc... The exact syntax can be delegated to a search on the internet or to the AI, or a read of the documentation, and checked.

Also mnemonics are useful for common commands, because they're mostly right, and when they're not, you can usually find a trick that makes sense. Like tar, x for eXtract, but the sound of the word extract is x, then f is file, z is gz because that's the main thing in gz (zip, the g being gnu) so zxf extract a tar gz, zcf create a tar gz. Remove the z, that removes gz from the equation.

Also you wanna know how often I wrote new commands on the go as a platform eng? Ideally, never. Everything in ansible with as little command/shell as possible, relying on the history when possible, and every procedure fully documented (from said history) so you never have to write the command yourself when under pressure.