Bandit7->8

Level Goal

The password for the next level is stored in the file data.txt next to the word millionth.

Commands useful to solve the level

grep
file optionnal
head optionnal
wc optionnal
cut optionnal

Helpful Reading Material

Where to start?

This Level is actually pretty easy and straightforward. We'll start by analysing the file and then we'll look for the command we need to complete our goal.

Part 1 : File Analysis

Let's first run the file utility on our data.txt file to know the type of content we have to deal with and to ensure that the file is not a malicious file that an attacker may have put in the directory to our intention.
Here is the output from the file command :

bandit7@bandit:~$ file data.txt 
data.txt: Unicode text, UTF-8 text
bandit7@bandit:~$

Now that we know that it is safe to run cat or any other utility that operates on text files on data.txt, let's try to run the head utility on this file.

Info

The head utility allows us to print only the few first lines (10 by default) of a file.

Here is the output from the head utility :

bandit7@bandit:~$ head data.txt
gallop  hu3ZhCrGRvfaO5jsY6ttvApzVCA2Hjvs
Aurelia's   ikl4F3cK5m6Cl6HAxva6zUAVJhI2Cvc6
stoicism    JiW9ts44udf20bJHe8H5dS1c99Muwz42
embodies    vWheZcAsQHZNnerI3ViW8wqOKIx0kbgR
Plato   dW2U8E5FfuAvNLdGDupP8GAxr922ZV0x
cultivation A90E75jvWbEKrijFxM4GxqHEw8c8U2Bf
stable  omR4PHolFwbI0IEJsanveA21yWvFy8a7
bedspread   VlBFxuEDi3phEpljbKbahRJvJxfh3k9M
oppressing  hQTiEm5XF3cUQSEiBjh7sekemLOKBrcJ
darnedest   9O2zdCLKVoW5u34P9T7EKTZXcMRE6xh5
bandit7@bandit:~$

Now we can get a better feel of how our file is built. We can run a last test on the file in order to get an idea of how many data we'll have to search in order to retrieve the information we're looking for.
Let's try to run the wc utility on the file to count how many lines there are in it. We'll give it the -l option to ensure that only the line count gets printed.

Here is the output from the wc utility :

bandit7@bandit:~$ wc -l data.txt 
98567 data.txt
bandit7@bandit:~$

We now know that there are close to 100k lines in the data.txt file. This analysis is not always useful but it can give valuable insight. Let's now move on to the actual challenge, the password retrieval

Part 2 : Password retrieval

After learning more about the file structure, we can get a feel of which command will be useful to retrieve our password string. Let's take a look at the grep utility to know if we can use it to retrieve our password.

Hint

Looking into the grep man page, figure out how we can retrieve any line containing the word millionth in the file data.txt

Solution

By running the command grep millionth data.txt we can retrieve any line containing the word millionth in the file data.txt. The password string will be the second column of that file

Full Solution

grep millionth data.txt to retrieve the only line containing the world millionth which also contains the password string, we can now copy and paste this password to go to the next level

Bonus : Cutting the output

Once we ran grep on our file, we get the following output :

bandit7@bandit:~$ grep millionth data.txt
millionth   password_string
bandit7@bandit:~$

We can now use the cut(1) utility to split the line we got into fields and only retrieve the field we need.

Hint

To know how to properly use the cut utility, look into the cut documentation page.

Solution

By running the line we got through a pipe and transferring its data to cut we can retrieve only the second field.
Here is the full command :

grep millionth data.txt | cut -f 2

You can now jump to the next level