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

Mini project: user and group management

For example, imagine that we want to allow every user who is a software developer at our company to read a given file – let’s call it document.txt. We can simply create a developers group and add all of our developer users to that group.

Then, when we’re setting ownership and permissions for document.txt, we can reference the developers group instead of trying to keep track of every single user who might be a member of that group individually.

Creating a user

On a Linux system that has the adduser command installed, you can use it to interactively create a user named dave. If you don’t, the package is usually named useradd (see Chapter 9, Managing Installed Software for more details on installing packages).

Running the command with a username as the only argument will give you a wizard-style user creation process. Notice that we’re using sudo here, since only root can add or delete users:

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