Recap of Level 1: We logged into the overthewire Bandit 1 after reading the file “readme” located in the /home/bandit0 directory.
Objective:
Find the password to the next level
Intel Given:
- Password is in a file named ‘-‘
- ‘-‘ is in the home directory
How to:
Normally we would read this simple human readable text document by using the command ‘cat -‘ however the usage of the dash as a filename presents some problems. – In BASH is used to redirect from/to STDIN(Standard In) or STDOUT (Standard Out). Technically you can change STDIN and STDOUT to anything, but for the sake of simplicity trust me when I say the defaults are your Keyboard and Bash prompt.
So what happens when we type ‘cat -‘? Essentially what this command is saying is “read standard in, and display it on standard out”. Which if we break down into further layman terms means, everything I type AFTER I enter this command, will be repeated. Go ahead and give it a try.
So how to get around this? Well we just explicitly tell Bash that we mean – the FILE and not – the operator. To do that we just list the entire path in the command. This is a concept that you’ll discover will help execute files as you advance further in your linux experience.
‘cat ./-‘ should give you the results you’re looking for. A period in bash denotes the current working directory, in this case it means /home/bandit1/ so you could also type ‘cat /home/bandit1/-‘ and have the same result, but its much simpler and a much more common syntax to type it in the way I showed above.
Conclusion:
I recommend research what STDIN and STDOUT as well as briefly search for Bash or Linux special characters.
