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

Executing previous commands with !

Executing previous commands is done with exclamation marks. There are various ways to use this trick, which we’ll look at now.

Re-running a command with the same arguments

The ! command will execute the last command with the previous arguments. For example, !ssh will go back and find the last ssh command you ran and execute it with the same arguments. You can use this to re-run commands that you frequently use with the same arguments, such as to quickly re-connect to the SSH server you connect to every day.

Prepending a command to something in your history

The !! command will execute the last command you ran, but with some other command in front of it. This may sound strange, but it’s very useful for situations where you accidentally ran a command that requires root privileges without sudo at the beginning.

apt-get install nginx # fails with a permission error
sudo !!
# this is the command that runs:
sudo apt-get...