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

Container theory: namespacing

If you’re wondering how some of this container magic works underneath, or just worried that you’ll have to troubleshoot a container environment under pressure one day, it’s useful to familiarize yourself with the concept of namespacing. You can skip this section if you’re not interested in how the container abstraction is built on Linux.

Namespacing is an overloaded term, used to mean different things in different technological niches. In the context of Linux containers, the idea of namespacing is best explained via chroot (change root). chroot is an old utility for Unix and Unix-like operating systems that allows a user to change the root (the / path) of the filesystem.

The usage of this tool is really quite simple: chroot /some/path will set whatever is in /some/path to be the new /. In addition to allowing OS installers to change into the system that is currently being installed to run commands, it also allows for...