Linux Commands Every Developer Should Know

Having spent the majority of my more recent workdays wrangling containers and navigating Linux systems in a variety of fashions it's become clear to me that there are some commands that every Software Developer working in a unix environment should know. Below are a list of some of those commands that I use on a day to day basis which can be incredibly helpful.

sed — Stream Editor

Use sed to find and replace text across files without opening them in an editor.

# Linux variant
$ sed -i 's/jeff/ben/g' ourfile.txt

# MacOS variant
$ sed -i '' 's/jeff/ben/g' ourfile.txt

cat — Concatenate and Print Files

$ cat ourfile.txt

head and tail — View File Portions

# Get the first 200 lines of a file
$ head -200 ourfile.txt

# Get the last 200 lines of a file
$ tail -200 ourfile.txt

sed — Range Selection

# Get the next 300 lines after line 40
$ sed -n '40,300 p' ourfile.txt

scp — Secure Copy

# Copy a file from your local machine to a remote server
$ scp our-local-file.txt youruser@serverip:/remote/directory

# Copy a file from a remote server to your local machine
$ scp youruser@serverip:/remote/directory ~/Documents

chown and chmod — Ownership and Permissions

# Change the ownership of a directory and its subdirectories and files
$ chown -R user:group directory

# Change the ownership of a single file
$ chown user:group file

# Make a file executable, useful for bash scripts
$ chmod +x yourscript.sh

# Only the owner can read, write and execute; no one else has permissions
$ chmod 700 yourfile

# Only the owner can read and write; no one else has permissions
$ chmod 600 yourfile

# Owner can read and write; group and world can only read
$ chmod 644 yourfile

zip — Compress Files

# Install the zip utility
$ apt-get install zip

# Zip the directory and its contents
$ zip -r newfilename.zip yourfolder

nohup — Run Processes in the Background

$ nohup yourscript.sh &

The nohup command lets a process continue running even after you log out of the shell session, with & sending it to the background immediately.