Think years of experience make you immune to Linux misconceptions? Here are the bad habits, outdated knowledge, and deep technical myths that trap seasoned sysadmins and DevOps engineers.
Back in 2021, I worked alongside a systems engineer with over fifteen years of Unix and Linux experience. He could write complex AWK one-liners from memory and managed dozens of bare-metal database servers.
One Friday afternoon, our monitoring alerts triggered. A primary database node showed only 300 MB of free memory in the dashboard.
Without checking what that memory was doing, he logged into the server and ran a command to drop cached memory directly in production:
echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
