Over The Wire - Bandit - Level 02#

Level Goal#

The password for the next level is stored in a file called - located in the home directory

Commands you may need to solve this level#

ls , cd , cat , file , du , find

Steps#

In this case the file is literally called -, you can list the file to be shown using the command ls and you can see the file is there.

But it’s not possible to just use the command cat - to read the file. See, the dash character is a special character, it’s used to define options into a program. Let’s see another example:

ls -l 

In this case, the command ls is using an option -l, which list files in a folder in a long list format.

So we cannot use cat -, because cat is selecting an option to be executed. To make this work we will need an alternative (and the reason of this challenge), because cat is waiting an input of a file, we will use some I/O redirection.

First let’s explain the Input/Output redirection. If we make something like echo "test text" > file.txt, this means that we will write into a console using echo the text "test text", and then redirect the Output into a file named file.txt using the > signal.

Ok, if the > means output, the < means input, right?

So let’s Input the file - into the cat command, it will be something like:

cat < -

And with that, we have the password for the next level.