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

Advanced file operations

When you’re working with files in Unix-like operating systems, you’ll often want to perform actions on them, with them, or with their content, but without directly modifying them in an editor. For example, you may want to:

  • Search a file to see if it contains some content you’re looking for.
  • Identify a batch of files that was modified at a specific time.
  • Securely move a file to another system, instead of just copying it around with mv on the local machine.

You may even want to combine all three into a single action! This type of knowledge can really come in handy during troubleshooting (searching for a specific request ID or error code in a log), during development (finding recently modified source code files), or when you want to do some testing (copying updated application source code to a test system).

Here’s a quick look at these kinds of file operations, to give you an idea of the tools and...