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

Changing ownership (chown) and permissions (chmod)

You’ll use two commands to change ownership and permissions on files: chown and chmod.

chown

chown (change owner) is used to change owner and group of a file. Usage is

chown [OPTION]... [OWNER][:[GROUP]] FILE...

For example, imagine we have this file:

$ ls -lh testfile 
-rw-r--r-- 1 dave dave 10 Aug 14 16:18 testfile

Change owner

Let’s change the owner to chris (presuming there’s a chris user on the system):

$ chown chris testfile
$ ls -lh testfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris dave 10 Aug 14 16:18 testfile

Change owner and group

We’ve changed the owner, but if we wanted to change the group, too, we could have run:

$ chown chris:staff testfile
$ ls -lh testfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris staff 10 Aug 14 16:18 testfile

Recursively change owner and group

One common task is changing the owner and group for all files in a given directory. You can do this with the -R or --recursive option:

$ chown -R dave:staff /home...