Identifying the only human readable file in a Linux folder - Over the wire Bandit level 4 - 5 password revealed

The over the wire Capture the Flag games are a great way to sharpen your command line linux skills.

To obtain the password to level 5 the prompt is:

The password for the next level is stored in the only human-readable file in the inhere directory. Tip: if your terminal is messed up, try the “reset” command.

What makes a file human-readable?

Let's find out!

When we run the ls command we see a folder:

Let's navigate to that folder:

cd inhere

There are ten possible files.

If we run the file command we see the following:

File07 is ASCII text aka "human readable".

Let's cat that to get our password!

cat ./-file07