My notes as I work through the OverTheWire Bandit wargame, redone from scratch to make sure I actually understand each step rather than just having the answer.
I'm not just posting the solving command. I'm documenting the process: what I tried, where I got confused, what a command actually does piece by piece, and what I'd do differently next time. Some of this process involved asking an AI assistant to break commands down letter-by-letter when I didn't understand a flag or piece of syntax. I'm noting that explicitly in the writeups rather than hiding it, because the explanation itself is part of what I learned. Not something to launder into "I just knew this."
No passwords or flags are posted, per OverTheWire's own request that players not post spoilers. Every password is shown as [REDACTED]. If you're stuck on a level, use these writeups to understand the technique, then run the commands yourself against your own game state.
Each level gets its own file: banditN-N+1.md, covering the password hop from level N to level N+1.
| Level | Topic |
|---|---|
| bandit0-1 | SSH basics, first login |
| bandit1-2 | Reading a file literally named - |
| bandit2-3 | Filenames with spaces |
| bandit3-4 | Hidden files (dotfiles) |
| bandit4-5 | Filenames starting with -, finding human-readable content |
| bandit5-6 | find by size across a directory tree |
| bandit6-7 | find by owner/group system-wide, suppressing errors |
| bandit7-8 | grep to pull a value out of a data file |
New levels get added as I complete them, see TEMPLATE.md for the format I use.
- SSH via terminal on desktop
- Termius on mobile for solving levels while away from my computer
- Standard GNU coreutils / findutils / grep, nothing exotic