Blog
Thoughts on engineering, design, and building great products.
Pipes, Redirects, and Data Streams
A deep dive into the mechanism behind the command line's power: the three streams stdin/stdout/stderr (file descriptors 0/1/2), how to redirect them into files, merge errors, discard with /dev/null, and chain commands with pipes.
Reading and Processing Text: grep, sed, awk and Friends
The toolset behind the power of the Linux command line: viewing files (cat, less, head, tail), filtering (grep), cutting columns (cut), sorting (sort, uniq), counting (wc), and transforming (sed, awk). Each tool does one thing well.
Editors: nano and vim
Edit files right in the terminal — a must-have skill when working on a server with no GUI. nano for beginners, and survival vim: understand the modes, open/edit/save/quit, search, undo.
File and Directory Operations
The commands you use every day: create, copy, move, rename, delete files and directories, create links, use wildcards to operate in bulk, and find files with find.
The Filesystem and FHS: Everything Is a File
Understand the Linux directory tree under the FHS standard — what each core directory (/etc, /var, /usr, /proc...) is for — and why Linux treats almost everything, including devices and process info, as a file. With a diagram and absolute/relative paths.
Setting Up a Linux Environment and Getting Comfortable with the Shell
Create a Linux environment to practice with using a container, understand the shell and the command prompt, run your first commands, and learn the keyboard shortcuts that make typing commands much faster.
What Is Linux and Why Developers Should Learn It
Series opener: the difference between the Linux kernel and a distro, why nearly every server and container runs Linux, the Unix philosophy behind the command line, and how to use a Linux container as a lab right on your Mac/Windows machine.