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

Automating Tasks with Shell Scripts

Sometimes, you’ll find yourself repeating the same few commands over and over, perhaps with slight variations. You reach the point of frustration, and say, “That’s it; I’m scripting this.” Being a CLI wizard, you do the following:

  1. Run tail -n 20 ~/.bash_history > myscript.sh to create a file that contains the last 20 Bash commands you ran.
  2. Then run bash myscript.sh to execute it.

Although this isn’t the recommended procedure (we’ll get to that in this chapter), it’s a perfectly valid way to create and run a Bash script.

This chapter is a Bash scripting crash course. Like any programming crash course, it is completely useless unless you actually follow along, type in all the code yourself, and run it in your own Linux environment. In addition to showing you the subset of Bash’s syntax which is considered modern and best-practice, we’ll give you...