overthewire-writeups

Bandit04 -> 05: Human Readable

Challenge

Level Description

The password for the next level is stored in the only human-readable file in the inhere directory. Tip: if your terminal is messed up, try the reset command.

The Process

I moved into the inhere directory and found a bunch of files named starting with a dash, like -file01, -file02, and so on. Most of these contain binary “garbage” that looks like a mess of symbols on the screen.

To find the right one without opening every single file manually, I used a wildcard * along with the cat command to peak into them. Since I knew from my previous notes that files starting with a dash need a ./ prefix, I ran:

$ cd inhere
$ cat ./-file*

Among the wall of weird symbols, one line stood out—it was a clean string of letters and numbers. That was our password!

Password For the Next Level

[SPOILER]

What I Learned

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