Beginner Linux for Ethical Hackers - Viewing, Creating, and Editing Files

Key Takeaways

okay so this is my second time recording this video the first time I forgot to turn my microphone on and performed for my cat so she approved of it let's see if you approve of it the second time around now that I have a little bit of practice so we're going to be talking today is we're talking about viewing creating and editing files so I've already showed you the echo command if you recall we used echo to create a file right we've created a hello Tex and we can just echo hello out to the terminal we could say echo hello and I'll say hello back so what we can do with echo is we can use it to write to a file so if we were to say echo hey and then we write it - hey dot txt well we can look and see that hey dot txt is here and you can see my files from the previous one so I'm trying to come with more ways of saying hello but we're going to use hey dot text here so if we cat hey dot Tex hey all cat does is print out to the screen what is in a file it says hey okay so let's say we want to append cat or we want to append hey dot txt well we can tab up here what if we just say hey again we've got this greater than symbol here and we're just putting it into the haida text file well that didn't work we didn't append it we actually overrode it so what if what can we use to actually over append this here what we can do is we could say hey again again right just to give us something different and we can add a second greater than symbol here so now if we cat the file you can see that we actually append it to the end of it so this becomes incredibly useful when we are either adding stuff to a list say we're gathering IP addresses if we just want to combine or lists or when we're creating a series of commands and we're going to use those commands to send all at once we're going to cover that later when we're talking about file transfers in the penetration testing section where we use a set of commands like this on a Windows machine to actually transfer files via FTP it's just so much easier than typing them all in one by one we can create a little document and run the document so this becomes useful when we have a series of commands and for other reasons as well as you'll learn as you go on in your Linux career so we've talked about echo and we've talked about cat so let's talk about some other ways to create a file we can use something called touch and to say new file dot txt and if we LS you could see that new file about Texas here but if we cat new file there's nothing in there because we haven't put anything in there yet so there's a few things that we can do we could use echo and append the file right we could also use a tool called Nano now Nano is a terminal text editor there are other terminal text editors like VY and vim I don't prefer those personally I like Nano the most some people have their preferences so I encourage you to play around with any of them as you wish by and them are the other two but for this course we're going to be using Nano so if I say Nano new file text I could type whatever I want in here and we're going to be using Nano a lot to create scripts to create Python scripts and to edit shell code as we get into a little bit of exploit development so I'm gonna hit control X I'm gonna hit Y for saving and then we'll save it to new file dot txt if we cap this now it says hey I could type whatever I want in here so that's one way of editing it another way of editing it is using a graphical interface so we can use G at it and say new file and if you don't like using a terminal you're more than welcome to use G edit here just type in new line here and save it and I I like using G edit it's a lot cleaner cuz I can you know highlight and delete I don't have to use my keyboard to navigate around like I do in the terminal so if you have the option to use G edit for sure but sometimes you're gonna be on another machine that's not your own or it's headless and doesn't have a GUI that you're gonna have to use now so get comfortable using bolt so we save this let's go ahead and cat it out and see what happens okay you can see that the new line is in there so really that's the overview that I wanted to cover so just know that you can create files pretty much using echo touch and actually you can create files using Nano as well if you say Nano this is new text I'll just say hello control X save it you LS you can see this is new Texas right here so you can use all of these tools in different ways to create files it's completely up to you how you want to do it personally what I'm creating a file I use Nano and I just create a new shell script Python script a text document that way you could also do it using G edit as well so just know that we're going to be using these a lot and try to get comfortable with these and from here we're going to be moving into controlling Kali services so we're just going to briefly talk about what services you need running on boot and how to do that [Music] [Music] you