I don’t get the 2010 reference, but flying cars are something that might fall into the “just because we can doesn’t mean we should” category. I’m assuming keeping something in the air costs much more energy and pollution than using an axel. Maybe there’s more to it.
* understand the basic directory structure (/, /boot/, /var, /usr, /opt, /etc)
* file management (commands: tail, head, cat, awk, sed)
* process management (commands: ps, top, kill)
* package management (yum, dpkg)
* one configuration manager (puppet, chef, ansible)
* basics of tcp/ip
network management (ifconfig/ip, netstata/ss, ping, trace)
addiontal commands if you want to be more than a junior (strace, lsof, iostat, vmstat)
I'd like to point out that some sysadmins are focused on linux internals while others focus on application in production. So, of course, the list may vary according to the position you're looking to be hired.
Good list, I'd also say permissions. The number of problems I fix by understanding users/groups and assigning the appropriate permission (not `chmod 777 *`) is huge. It shows up in a variety of "Cannot access file" type messages or "File does not exist" application errors and people sometimes freak out because the file is there.
