Conquering the Command Line: Unix and Linux Commands for Developers

This book is for new developers, experienced developers, and everyone in between who wants to master Unix and Linux commands. This book was designed to showcase some of the most useful commands that a developer can know to help them in their daily tasks.

This book is not an exhaustive manual for each of these commands; in fact, it is just the opposite. Instead of just collecting up MAN pages, this book pulls out the most useful flags, options, and arguments for each of the commands in the book.

By learning and understanding the subset of flags, options, and arguments for each command, you’ll be able to more efficiently use each one in your daily development workflow – while understanding where to look to find the more esoteric options you’ll only need occasionally.

No matter where you’re starting, Mark Bates’s Conquering the Command Line is for you. Mark is an expert developer, lucid writer, and acclaimed speaker, and I can’t think of a better guide to the ins and outs of the Unix command line from the perspective of a working developer rather than a Unix sysadmin. Mark’s approach is not to give you an exhaustive and overwhelming catalog of each command and everything it can do, but rather to carefully select the most important commands and the most useful options. In other words, this is a curated introduction to the Unix command line.

Conquering the Command Line starts with the essential basics’things like pwd, ls, and cd-and then takes you on a tour of the more exotic animals in the Unix zoo. The result is that you’ll quickly move past mv to master commands like curl, grep, find, and ack-not to mention ps, tar, and sed. Because of the ubiquity of Unix, the knowledge you gain will serve you well whether you use OS X, Linux, or *BSD. (And if you’re stuck running Windows’well, you can always install a Linux virtual machine.)

I certainly don’t consider myself a Unix god, or indeed any other kind of OS deity. For all I know, neither did that local guru. But we can all aspire at least to demigod status, and Conquering the Command Line will help get you there. Please remember, though, to use your new-found Unix powers for good, not for evil-with great sudo comes great responsibility.

– Michael Hartl