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

Editing Files on the Command Line

Editing text on the command line is often a hard requirement due to the constraints of production systems, which tend to lack a graphical user interface. However, becoming fluent at editing text on the command line has many benefits even outside of those systems – indeed, even when you have graphical text editors or integrated development environments (IDEs) available.

For example, many full-featured text editors and IDEs support the patterns you’ll learn about in this chapter, which means the speed and efficiency you gain is transferrable to other tools. In fact, you can use the shortcuts you’ll learn in this chapter for all kinds of things, from quickly finding and replacing text to correcting a misspelled word in the middle of a long shell command.

You might even find similar shortcuts built into your favorite tools (sometimes via plugins); for example, you’re only a few Google searches away from discovering...