If you really want to see what's happening beneath the hood of your Linux distribution, you need to use log files.

With tail, you can view a Linux log file as the system writes to it in real time. So while you’re trying to troubleshoot that system, you can follow the syslog, the auth.log, faillog, kern.log ...

The tail command makes it easy to view log entries as they are written in real-time. Jack Wallen shows you how to make use of this indispensable tool.

Viewing the content of files and examining access permissions and such are very different options. This post examines a number of ways to look at files on Linux.