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

sudo

Because it would be an inconvenience to have to log in as a separate user every time you want to do something potentially dangerous on a system, there’s the sudo command. Prefixing a command with sudo, which stands for “substitute user (and) do,” lets you perform that command as the root user. When that command finishes executing and exits, your next command is interpreted as coming from your regular (non-root) user again.

You can see this behavior for yourself by running two commands. First, run the whoami command, which is a command that prints out the current user:

whoami

In this case. I’m logged in as the “dave" user, so this command prints out:

dave

Now, prepend “sudo" to that same command:

sudo whoami

Even though you’re still logged in as a non-root user, your effective user ID has changed for the duration of a single command, because of sudo:

root

Let’s look at a more...