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Bash Cheat Sheet: Top 25 Commands and Creating Custom Commands

The command line is something every developer should learn and implement into their daily routine. It has become a Swiss Army knife of features behind deceptively simple commands, which allow you to gain greater control of your system, become more productive, and much more. For example, you can write scripts to automate daily, time-consuming tasks, and even quickly commit and push code to a Git repository with just a few simple commands.

In this post, we’ll look at the Bash Shell (Bourne Again SHell), which is a command-line interface (CLI) and is currently the most widely used shell. This is a light introduction to the most popular commands, when you’re most likely to use them, and how to extend them with options. Later on in this article, you’ll learn how to create your own custom commands (aliases), allowing you to create shortcuts for a single command or a group of commands.

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Exploring the Potential and Future of Ubuntu Server With Jay LaCroix

Ubuntu Server has taken data centers around the world by storm. Whether you're deploying Ubuntu for a large-scale project or for a small office, it is a stable, customizable, and powerful Linux distribution with innovative and cutting-edge features.

Ubuntu is a fantastic platform on which to build your servers -- Jay LaCroix

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Resetting a Password Using Chroot

chroot has quite a unique history. The chroot system call was the first major step towards process-level virtualization, i.e. providing an isolated environment for a process (though only at the file system level). Virtualization is an enabler for cloud computing. You can read more about chroot here. Let's look at a real-life scenario where chroot helped my team.

Problem

During my post-graduate development, my team faced a situation where we had to reset a password for a system as the old password was not known. This system was being used for virtualization-related research cluster. This system was installed with a particular virtualization-patched kernel and many other utilities and their configs. To recreate the same environment freshly was hard and error-prone.

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The Future of Open Source

Learn more about the future of open-source software.

The world of open-source software seems to be going through a period of soul-searching. On the one hand, individual maintainers have retracted packages, causing disruption for the communities that depended on those packages. On the other, software-as-a-service providers are making more money from some applications than their creators.

This is all happening in a world where businesses depend on open-source to operate. It doesn't matter whether you're an individual launching a startup with PHP and MySQL, or a multi-national replacing your mainframe with a fleet of Linux boxes running Java. Your business depends on the work of people that have their own motivations, and those motivations may not align with yours. I think this is an untenable situation, one that will eventually resolve by changing the nature of open-source.

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Get Started With Vim

This is the tutorial I wish I had around some years ago when I first tried to learn how to use Vim. If you’re just beginning to know this amazing text editor, please keep reading; I am writing this tutorial right for you!

Whether you prefer to code in a simple steps editor or in a full-fledged IDE, the fact remains that a console-based text mode editor can be an invaluable tool for many purposes, from coding to remote system administration. VIM (Vi IMproved) is the most common version of a classic UNIX text editor named vi, which is currently available on almost any platform. It’s one of the most useful and complex console tools you can find, and also one you can make use right away, no matter what you do for a living (everyone needs to write something, right?).

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10 Things Every Programmer and Software Engineer Should Know

If you have been programming for some time and looking to learn to program then you might be thinking about what makes a good programmer. What can a computer science graduate do to prepare for a career in software development and programming? The things expected of a junior developer are some of the common questions I receive from many students on Facebook and Emails who follows me. These are mostly college students who now have access to a wealth of information thanks to the internet and eager to learn things in advance to prepare for their programming job interviews.

In this article, I'll share 10 things which I believe every programmer should know. This includes a programming language like C++ or Java, essential computer science concepts like data structures, algorithms and computer networking basics, essential tools like Git, Microsoft Word and Excel, skills like SQL and UNIX, editors like Eclipse or Visual Studio, and text editors.