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

Advanced File Operations

grep

Text matching is traditionally done with grep. On your personal or work laptop, you may want to install ag or rg, which are more programmer-friendly and faster versions of this idea, but on production systems, you’ll always have grep.

Search for the pattern “search_pattern” in the file path/to/file:

grep "search_pattern" path/to/file

You can, of course, search for string literals like this, but grep is so powerful because it allows you to use regular expressions (“regexes”) to search for patterns. The following command will return lines that start with startswith:

grep ^startswith /some/file

And this command will return lines that end with endswith:

grep endswith$ /some/file

Regular expressions are tremendously useful, and every developer and Linux user should be familiar with the basics.

find

find can help you find files and directories by name, modification time, or other attributes. It’s essentially...