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

Ownership

To change the owner of files or directories, use the chown (change owner) command. The syntax is chown user:group path where user is the name of the owning user and group is the name of the group, while path is the full or relative part to the file or directory.

You can omit the colon and the group to just change the owning user and leave group ownership alone. Of course, the user attempting to change permissions on a file needs to have permission to do so, so in most situations this command will be run as the root user.

In the following command snippet, you see a long listing of a file owned by root, which subsequently has its owner changed using the chown command:

bash-3.2$ ls -l mysecret.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root staff 0 Apr 12 15:39 mysecret.txt
bash-3.2$ sudo chown dave mysecret.txt
bash-3.2$ ls -l mysecret.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 dave staff 0 Apr 12 15:39 mysecret.txt