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

Files on Linux: the absolute basics

In order to break up the larger topic of files on Linux, let’s cover some of the absolute basics that you probably already have some intuition of: plaintext files and binary files. We’ll also cover a practical error that you might see if you move Windows files to a Unix system, or vice versa.

Plaintext files

One of the simplest forms of text files you’ll encounter is the mighty plaintext file. While historically they were ASCII files, they are now typically UTF-8 encoded. You might come across other file encodings, but this is rare as they are generally considered obsolete.

What is a binary file?

Unix doesn’t differentiate between binary and text files, the way many other operating systems do. All files can be streamed through pipes, edited, and appended to. A file is just a file. When a file is set to be executable, Unix will do its best to execute it, either succeeding in the case of ELF (Executable...