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

What is a user?

A user, in the context of a Unix system, is simply a named entity that can do things on the system. Users can launch and own processes, own files and directories and have various permissions on them, and be allowed or prevented from doing things or using resources on the system. Practically, a user is who you log in as, what your processes run as, or who owns your files.

The word “user” is obviously a metaphor for a real person with a user account, a password, and so on. But most “users” on real systems don’t actually represent specific humans. They’re machine accounts, meant to group resources like processes and files for the purposes of security or organization.

But there’s a much more important distinction than whether or not an account is intended to be used interactively by a human operator. There are exactly two types of users, and before we jump into practical user-management skills, we need to talk about...