Bandit · Level 04

Level 4

Login

SSH: ssh [email protected] -p 2220

Challenge URL: https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/bandit5.html

Task

The password for the next level is stored in the only human-readable file in the inhere directory.

Solution

Let's see the files present:

bandit4@bandit:~$ ls
inhere
bandit4@bandit:~$ cd inhere
bandit4@bandit:~/inhere$ ls
-file00  -file01  -file02  -file03  -file04  -file05  -file06  -file07  -file08  -file09

Basic: cat the entire directory because only one file is human readable.

To find which file has ASCII text in the entire directory: find all files and pipe it to file.
We have to use xargs before file. This will give the info about the files.

Another way is to use the wildcard character (*) like this: file ./* inside /inhere directory.

bandit4@bandit:~/inhere$ file ./*
# or
bandit4@bandit:~/inhere$ find . | xargs file
.:         directory
./-file06: Non-ISO extended-ASCII text, with NEL line terminators
./-file09: data
./-file01: data
./-file08: data
./-file00: data
./-file03: data
./-file07: ASCII text
./-file02: OpenPGP Secret Key
./-file05: data
./-file04: data

Then we can pipe it to grep "ASCII" to filter out human readable files.

bandit4@bandit:~/inhere$ file ./* | grep "ASCII text"
./-file06: Non-ISO extended-ASCII text, with NEL line terminators
./-file07: ASCII text
# use grep ": ASCII" to get only ASCII text files.
bandit4@bandit:~$ file ./inhere/* | grep ": ASCII text"
./inhere/-file07: ASCII text

The file -file07 is our file.

To extract the filename which satisfies the pattern, use cut with delimiter -d ":" and get the first column using -f1. Finally, print the contents of the file:

bandit4@bandit:~$ file ./inhere/* | grep ": ASCII" | cut -d ":" -f1
./inhere/-file07
bandit4@bandit:~$ file ./inhere/* | grep ": ASCII" | cut -d ":" -f1 | xargs cat

One liner: file ./inhere/* | grep ": ASCII" | cut -d ":" -f1 | xargs cat
This extracts the file that satisfies the patter and prints the contents of the file.