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
Other Books You May Enjoy
19
Index

Setting your preferred editor

Linux and in fact all Unix-like systems allow you to set your preferred editor via the EDITOR environment variable. Most command-line software that launches an editor for certain tasks, like git when you make a commit or visudo editing your sudoers file, will use this variable to know which editor to open. You can set this EDITOR variable to a path to any editor you like, even graphical ones (provided your system has a graphical user interface installed):

bash-3.2$ echo $EDITOR
nano
bash-3.2$ export EDITOR=vim

Note that the interactive shell command above will only work until the current shell session is closed; to persist this setting in the Bash shell, I’d add it to my ~/.bashrc file. See Chapter 4, Using Shell History for more details.