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

Basics

Bash can be learned like any other programming language. It’s got an environment (Unix or Linux), a kind of standard library (any CLI-driven program installed on the system), variables, control flow (loops, testing, and iteration), interpolation, a few built-in data structures (arrays, strings, and booleans – sort of), and more.

This entire book assumes that you’re a software developer and, therefore, know how to program, so rather than teach you about these standard programming-language features, we’ll simply show you what they look like in Bash, along with some advice on idiomatic use (or common misuse).

Variables

Like any programming language, Bash has variables that can either be empty or set to a value. Unset variables are simply “empty,” and Bash will happily use them without panicking unless you set the -u (error on unset variables) option via set -u.

Setting

To set a variable, use the equals sign.

FOOBAR...