Bandit 4 → 5

OverTheWire Linux Progressive

Goal: find the only human-readable file among ten in the inhere directory.

Approach

bandit4@bandit

bandit4@bandit:~/inhere$ file ./*
./-file00: data
./-file01: data
./-file02: data
./-file03: data
./-file04: data
./-file05: data
./-file06: data
./-file07: ASCII text
./-file08: data
./-file09: data
bandit4@bandit:~/inhere$ cat ./-file07
The password you are looking for is: <password>

Password4oQYVPkxZOOEOO5pTW81FB8j8lxXGUQwReveal

Why it works

file classifies each input by inspecting its leading magic bytes and content rather than its name, so the one ASCII text file stands out from nine binaries without opening each by hand. The ./ prefix again keeps the dash-led names from reading as options.