OverTheWire Bandit

The one where you just have to get in the door — SSH basics and reading your first file.

A filename made of one character the shell had already claimed.

Whitespace is an argument separator before it's a character in a name.

ls told me there was nothing there. ls was being polite.

Ten files, one of them readable — and a command that tells you which without printing any of them.

Twenty directories, one file that matches the description — and a lesson about which filter to reach for.

The level where ls stops helping, and where 2>/dev/null finally made sense.

I cat'd a four-megabyte file into my terminal so you don't have to.

A file full of passwords where the only thing marking the real one is that it isn't repeated.

Most of the file isn't text. The password is, and it's wearing a marker.

Encoded, not encrypted — and one flag undoes it.

Every letter shifted thirteen places — plus a mistake I made reading the command.

Over an hour, split across a morning and an afternoon. The level that made me learn what /tmp is for.

An SSH key instead of a password, a localhost that refused, and an hour of finding out why scp is on the allowed list.