Book Image

The Software Developer's Guide to Linux

By : David Cohen, Christian Sturm
5 (2)
Book Image

The Software Developer's Guide to Linux

5 (2)
By: David Cohen, Christian Sturm

Overview of this book

Developers are always looking to raise their game to the next level, yet most are completely lost when it comes to the Linux command line. This book is the bridge that will take you to the next level in your software development career. Most of the skills in the book can be immediately put to work to make you a more efficient developer. It’s written specifically for software engineers, not Linux system administrators, so each chapter will equip you with just enough theory to understand what you’re doing before diving into practical commands that you can use in your day-to-day work as a software developer. As you work through the book, you’ll quickly absorb the basics of how Linux works while you get comfortable moving around the command line. Once you’ve got the core skills, you’ll see how to apply them in different contexts that you’ll come across as a software developer: building and working with Docker images, automating boring build tasks with shell scripts, and troubleshooting issues in production environments. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to use Linux and the command line comfortably and apply your newfound skills in your day-to-day work to save time, troubleshoot issues, and be the command-line wizard that your team turns to.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
18
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19
Index

Command-line syntax (read)

All REPLs start by reading some input. On the Linux command line, commands that the shell reads in need to have the correct syntax. Commands take this basic form:

commandname options

In programming terms, you can think of the command name as a function name, and the options as any number of arguments that will be passed to that function. This is important, because there is no single fixed syntax for all the options – each command defines which parameters it will accept. Because of this, the shell can do very little to validate a command’s correctness beyond checking that the command maps to an executable.

Note

The terms “program” and “command” are used interchangeably in this chapter. There’s a very slight difference because some shell builtins are defined in the shell’s code and are therefore not technically separate programs of their own, but you don’t need to worry...