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

Syslog basics

Compared to the systemd/journald logging we’ve shown you, syslog may seem a bit archaic. We prefer to think of it as having a storied history – although it’s been around since the 1980s, it’s still a useful, flexible, and widely-used logging tool. More importantly, you’re almost guaranteed to come across it on real production systems, so it’s worth knowing the basics to avoid being caught off guard during an outage where time is critical.

On a Unix-like system, logging to syslog is often equivalent to logging to a file in /var/log, with the majority of messages typically going to /var/log/messages. Keep in mind, however, that not everything you find in /var/log necessarily went through syslog. Various pieces of software also implement their own way of writing log files, skipping the syslog daemon entirely.

This works by syslog ingesting all the logs sent to it and depending on various parameters, like the facilities mentioned...