OverTheWire Bandit: Level 0 → Level 1

The Goal

Find the password for Level 1. It’s stored in a file called readme in the home directory.

What I Did

After logging in as bandit0, the first thing I did was run ls to see what was in the home directory:

bandit0@bandit:~$ ls
readme

One file. readme. My first instinct was to cd into it:

bandit0@bandit:~$ cd readme
-bash: cd: readme: Not a directory

That failed, which made sense after a second of thinking — cd is for directories, not files. readme is a file. I needed to read it, not navigate into it.

I wasn’t sure which command to use, so I checked the man page for cat:

man cat

cat outputs the contents of a file to the terminal. That’s what I needed. I also explored the /home directory out of curiosity — ran cd .. and ls to see what other users existed on the system. There were a lot of them — bandit0 through bandit33 plus dozens of other wargame users. I didn’t fully understand what I was looking at but made a mental note for later.

Back in the home directory, I ran:

bandit0@bandit:~$ cat readme

That printed the password.

I also tried cat -A on my local passwords file while setting things up. The -A flag shows hidden characters — every line ends with a $ to mark the line ending, and you can spot invisible spaces or Windows-style line endings that wouldn’t show up otherwise. Not needed here but useful to know.

What I Learned

cat reads and prints the contents of a file. The name stands for concatenate — it was originally designed to join files together, but reading a single file is its most common use.

cd only works on directories. If you try to cd into a file you get an error. Files and directories are different things in Linux — ls -l shows which is which (directories have a d at the start of the permissions column).

The /home directory contains a folder for every user on the system. On this server that means every Bandit level has its own user account, and each user can only read their own files by default. This is Linux file permissions in action — something the later levels get heavily into.

The Connection to What I’ve Been Studying

This level is simple on the surface but it demonstrates something from CS50 Cybersecurity: least privilege. Each bandit user only has access to their own home directory. Even though I could see all the other user folders listed in /home, I couldn’t read their files. Access is controlled at the user level, and every user gets exactly the permissions they need — nothing more.

Commands Used

Command	What it did
ls	Listed files in the current directory
cd readme	Failed — readme is a file, not a directory
cd ..	Moved up to the parent directory /home
man cat	Read the manual for cat
cat readme	Printed the contents of the file
cat -A	Shows file contents with hidden characters visible