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

Bash versus other shells

A huge variety of shell programs exist for Unix-like environments; you could argue that one of the major reasons for Unix’s popularity is the fact that it’s always been an environment with essentially no barriers to scripting and automation.

This chapter teaches you how to write your own scripts in Bash. Much of what you’ll learn here will also work on other shells (for example, ksh and other common minimal shells that you’ll find at /bin/sh), but we’re focused on Bash here.

If you’re writing a shell script, Bash strikes the perfect balance between wide availability and a language feature set that’s large enough to make it comfortable to write small programs.