OverTheWire Bandit Level 5 → 6 Walkthrough
Using find with a size filter to locate the password among many decoy files
Level goal: The password for the next level is stored in a file somewhere under the inhere directory and has all of the following properties: - human-readable - 1033 bytes in size - not executable
Commands you may need: ls, cd, cat, file, du, find
Helpful reading: None
Write-up
I cd-ed into the inhere directory to find numerous other directories within it. I looped through all the directories and searched for files of size 1033 bytes.
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for x in `find . -type d -print`;
do
find $x -size 1033c -print;
done
This gave me
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./maybehere07/.file2
./maybehere07/.file2
Getting two exact same outputs was eerie. After some investigation I found out that find command is recursive and checks inside subdirectories on its own. Hence our loop was unecessary.
Thus a simple find inhere -size 1033c -print in the home directory would have done the job. cat ~/inhere/maybeinhere07/.file2 gives the password.
Level 6 password:
DXjZPULLxYr17uwoI01bNLQbtFemEgo7