PicoCTF - First Find

First use wget to download the files.zip

wget https://artifacts.picoctf.net/c/500/files.zip

Extract the file using zip.

unzip -u files.zip

After that you will get a list of all the available folders and files that look like this.

Archive:  files.zip
   creating: files/
   creating: files/satisfactory_books/
   creating: files/satisfactory_books/more_books/
  inflating: files/satisfactory_books/more_books/37121.txt.utf-8  
  inflating: files/satisfactory_books/23765.txt.utf-8  
  inflating: files/satisfactory_books/16021.txt.utf-8  
  inflating: files/13771.txt.utf-8   
   creating: files/adequate_books/
   creating: files/adequate_books/more_books/
   creating: files/adequate_books/more_books/.secret/
   creating: files/adequate_books/more_books/.secret/deeper_secrets/
   creating: files/adequate_books/more_books/.secret/deeper_secrets/deepest_secrets/
 extracting: files/adequate_books/more_books/.secret/deeper_secrets/deepest_secrets/uber-secret.txt  
  inflating: files/adequate_books/more_books/1023.txt.utf-8  
  inflating: files/adequate_books/46804-0.txt  
  inflating: files/adequate_books/44578.txt.utf-8  
   creating: files/acceptable_books/
   creating: files/acceptable_books/more_books/
  inflating: files/acceptable_books/more_books/40723.txt.utf-8  
  inflating: files/acceptable_books/17880.txt.utf-8  
  inflating: files/acceptable_books/17879.txt.utf-8  
  inflating: files/14789.txt.utf-8

The exercise instructs us to open the file ‘uber-secret.txt’

We can always use cd and then cat to move to the specified directory and view its contents. The command is the following.

cat files/adequate_books/more_books/.secret/deeper_secrets/deepest_secrets/uber-secret.txt

But we can use another command to search through subfolders of a specified directory.

pwd

Use pwd to find your current working directory.

For example, if the unzip folders and files of the above .zip file are located inside the home directory you can use the following command, in order to search for the file.

find ~/ -name "uber-secret.txt"

Nice, you’ve got the flag!