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

File attributes

The first field displays a file’s attributes: file type and permissions. In other words, this field shows us which type of file we’re looking at, and what its file permissions are. The default lists this information in symbolic mode, in contrast to numeric mode, which you can view with -n.

File type

-rw-r--r--  1 root root  386 Feb 16  2023 os-release

The first character here indicates the file type. In the listing above, the - character indicates a regular file. Lines starting with l indicate a symbolic link, which is simply a special file that has no content of its own, and just points to another location on the filesystem. You can think of it as a Windows shortcut or a macOS file alias.

Other common file types are d, indicating a directory, or c, which indicates that you’re looking at a character file – you’ll mainly find the latter in /dev, representing hardware input devices such as keyboards. For more on file...