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

Shell history

Most shells keep a history of the commands you’ve run. This means that you can see every successful command that you’ve run just by pressing the arrow keys: the Up-Arrow key to go back one command and Down-Arrow to go forward one. Scrolling through your shell history like this can be very useful, especially if you find that you’re re-running similar commands frequently.

Note that you can also edit commands that you find like this: use Left-Arrow and Right-Arrow to navigate to the line of text that is a command, and just type to edit the command.

An edited command is added to the end of your shell history (it doesn’t actually modify the saved line in the history).

Together, these tricks allow you to easily go back and re-execute or modify previous commands.

Shell configuration files

Some of the tricks we’ll talk about require changes to your shell’s configuration file. The workflow is usually the following...