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

Advanced: what is a user, really?

Users and groups are one place where something quite wonderful about Unix and Linux can be seen clearly: there’s very little magic here.

A Linux user is really just a User ID (UID), which is a simple numerical representation of a user (an unsigned 32-bit integer). The root user’s UID is 0. All other users have a UID larger than 0. The same goes for groups.

This information is not stored in some secret location, in some binary format, or some proprietary data structure that only the operating system can work with: users and groups are defined in plaintext files, which are traditionally modified using the few simple commands we’ve covered here.

That simplicity and lack of magic means that mere mortals (such as a panicked developer with just a faded memory of this chapter) can quickly find out the state of users and groups on a running system, troubleshooting application errors that may come from an incorrectly prepared...