Checking for linear independence of rows vs columns?

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My professor assigned us homework problems that ask to check (a) whether the columns are linearly independent and (b) whether the rows are linearly independent for a series of augmented matrices.

I know that to check for columns, you solve the homogenous system Ax=0 to see if there is a nontrivial solution but I have no idea what the procedure would be to check the rows for linear independence.

Do you just treat each row as a column vector and set them equal to a zero vector in a similar way? Or is there some sort of shortcut? (Such as with columns one can quickly figure out if there are free variables or not.)