OverTheWire Bandit Level 5 → 6 Walkthrough

#Goal

Find password, which is stored in file under inhere directory and has following properties :-

1. Human-readable
2. 1033 bytes in size
3. Not executable

NOTE: We don't need every single property to get the password

#Solution

To view contents of a directory

bandit5@bandit:~$ ls
inhere

To change directory

bandit5@bandit:~$ cd inhere/
bandit5@bandit:~/inhere$

To view content of this directory

bandit5@bandit:~/inhere$ ls
maybehere00  maybehere03  maybehere06  maybehere09  maybehere12  maybehere15  maybehere18  maybehere01  maybehere04  maybehere07  maybehere10  maybehere13  maybehere16  maybehere19  maybehere02  maybehere05  maybehere08  maybehere11  maybehere14  maybehere17

Manually checking every folder would be inefficient. Instead, we can search for files matching the required size.

bandit5@bandit:~/inhere$ find . -size 1033c
./maybehere07/.file2

Command Explanation

find . → We are using find command to recursively search inside our current directory (/inhere) -size 1033c → Searches for files with a size of 1033 bytes

Now to view the password, we first move into that directory

bandit5@bandit:~/inhere/maybehere07$ cd maybehere07/

And to view its content

bandit5@bandit:~/inhere/maybehere07$ ls -a
.  ..  -file1  .file1  -file2  .file2  -file3  .file3  spaces file1  spaces file2  spaces file3

NOTE: We used ls -a because the file was hidden as it starts with .

To view content of a hidden file (or file whose name starts with .)

bandit5@bandit:~/inhere/maybehere07$ cat .file2
<level_password_here>

Command Explanation

cat .file2 → View content of .file2

#Key Takeaways

• Use find to filter files efficiently
• File size can be specified with c for bytes
• Hidden files start with .

#Refer for further learning

1. How to use find command to search for files based on file size