Tripping Over the Wire

Bandit Level 5 → 6

Level Goal

Level 5 → 6

The password for the next level is stored in a file somewhere under the inhere directory and has all of the following properties:

Commands you may need to solve this level:

ls, cd, cat, file, du, find

Thought Process

First things first, just poke around and see what we're working with. A directory with a lot of subdirectories, with a lot of files in those subdirectories.

Initially I thought I could do something similar to the last level with file to find the human-readable file but I couldn't get it to recurse. I might try a nested loop but that seems off-base.

Next I read the man pages for du and find, which both seem promising. find seems to get me closer to where I want to go and I can daisy chain a couple of arguments to get most of the way to where I need to be.

find . -type f -size 1033c ! -executable

-type f looks for regular files as opposed to a number of other file types

-size <filesize><unit of measurement> gives me a specific file size, but the filesize could be prepended with + or - to look for file larger or smaller than.

-executable searches for files with the exectuable permission bit toggles, and prepending it with ! negates it to search for non-executable files.

This returns just one file which file ./pathname tells me is ASCII text, but very long. Sure enough cat gets me the password and a bunch of empty space.