2.2 Useful Commands (KL)
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Video Transcription
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>> Hello, and welcome to this Kali Fundamentals lesson.
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I'm your host Robert Smith and
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I'm excited to be here with you today.
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We've gone over some things like commands
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to navigate the file system,
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some very high-level overviews
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of permissions, things of that nature.
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But you may be wondering,
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there's still a lot of commands out there.
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There's some things I may not know.
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What are some additional things that
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I could learn that'll help me to get
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around Linux and Kali and things of that nature.
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Well, today we're going to jump into those things.
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We're going to get some basic understanding
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of some useful commands.
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We're going to see how those commands can be used,
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and again we'll continue to build on this foundation that
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we've put together and go from there.
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I'm going to go ahead and bring in
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my copy of Kali that I've installed here,
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and you'll see that I've got a terminal opened
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up and we're currently in the desktop folder.
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With that in mind I've got
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a few things I wanted to show you.
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You may be thinking,
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I have an Internet connection,
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I can look up commands and
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understand what they do but what happens if you don't,
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or what if you just want to see
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a quick easy lookup of a command or something like that.
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Well, I'd like to introduce you
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to the man command or manual.
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When you type man and a command like ping let's say,
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it pulls up a bunch of information.
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As you can see here, it gives you
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the name of the command at the top,
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a quick synopsis,
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it gives you a short description,
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some options and as you scroll
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through down towards the bottom
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of all these different things that it provides,
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it's got a packet details
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and some additional information.
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Lot of cool stuff there.
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Now, there's multiple ways to use this.
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We can hit "Q," and that takes us
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back to our desktop here.
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We'll do a quick clear to bring that back up.
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Now, we talked about cat or concatenate.
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You'll see over here to the left I've got this
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hello bash file that I've created.
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If I type cat and do hello,
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it shows me the output for that file.
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As you can see here I've got some line that I've
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written here for starting a bash script,
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and then I use this command called echo.
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You might be wondering, well, what
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does echo do? What does that mean?
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Well, if we do man echo,
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like we were looking at earlier.
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As you can see it displays the name,
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gives you some descriptions.
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It says here it displays a line of text.
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This can be useful if we're writing
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a bash script and we need an output where we want
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it to reference something and produce
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an output from the system or something of that nature.
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We can do that using the echo command.
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That's going to be useful for you when you start
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working on scripting and things of that nature,
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and you're jumping into trying to make
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some more complex ways of doing
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things or simplifying things and things of that nature.
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Now, you can easily use leaf pad down here,
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and edit texts and
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do things of that nature and edit files.
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But let's say I'm here on this desktop folder,
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and I just want to jump straight into that text file or
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that batch file I can do nano and
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hello and bam, there we are.
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I've got my text editor opened now.
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There are several different types of
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text editors that you can use.
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I like to use nano,
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some folks like the eyes,
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some other things like that.
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But in this case this is what I like to use.
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Now, as you can see here I
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typed echo and then hello world.
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Let's say I want to make it a little
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more exciting and happy.
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I do Hello world and two
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exclamation points here on the end.
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As you can see down at the bottom,
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it gives you some commands that you can use,
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you typically hold control and hit the letter.
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I'll hit "Control O" to write out.
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I'm going to do hello new, hit "Enter".
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Select the S by hitting
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Y and then I'll hit "Control X" to exit the text editor.
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Now when I do cat,
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hellonew, we'll see that that's made the change for me.
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Then from there I can do a quick bash,
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hellonew, and bam,
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there it is, hello world using
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that echo command. That's awesome.
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Now, we know that we're root.
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We'll jump into the next command here. I am root.
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Let's say that I'm a different user
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or you're a pen tester or security tester.
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You got into a system.
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You want to know what permissions the user account has.
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Well, you can use the command called id,
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and that gives you an output of the permissions that
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the account that you're currently logged into has.
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That's a good useful thing to have.
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Let's say you need to install something.
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You notice, I'm the root user,
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I can install new programs,
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applications, but how much space do I have?
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How much information can I
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really store on this drive right now?
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Df will show us the free disk space or
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the disk space that's free on
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the system and where everything's at,
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and it gives you this nice layout
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here of what's been used on
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the right when it's
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mounted on as far as the share what have you,
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available space, huge space, etc.
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That's a quick and easy way to do
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some troubleshooting or check to
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see how much free space you have.
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Now, I'm going to introduce you
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to what I think is one of the most important commands,
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which is passwd, which is password for short.
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When we hit "Enter" it asks me for a new password.
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I'm going to go ahead and update that [NOISE].
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Oops, Looks like we made a mistake.
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Well, we can't see what we're doing.
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But that's okay, if I had done that
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correctly what it would have done is
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updated my password and that's very much
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important when you inherited a system,
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when you work on a system day to day,
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and maybe you need to change
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the password or something of that nature or you
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don't want the default credentials on
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something then in a Linux environment you can use
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that passwd command and it will
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allow you to change the password.
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I know that was a lot of information.
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Those are the commands that we want to start with
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and the things that we want to learn to use.
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Those are going to be fundamental in
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helping you to not only edit
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files and produce better scripts
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and things of that nature.
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But they're going to give you
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that foundational toolset to continue to move deeper and
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deeper into your understanding of
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not just Kali but Linux platforms as a whole.
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Now that we've gone through that together,
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let's do a quick check on learning.
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Which command describes and
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shows you how to use other commands.
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Now, thinking about that,
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remember df is going to show us disk space that's free.
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Df down here, nano was our text editor.
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That's going to allow me to edit files,
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edit content, make scripts,
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do things of that nature.
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Cat, allowed me to pull
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the output out of the file and
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display it in the terminal like we did.
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Cat hellonew or cat hello,
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and that showed us all of the content of the file.
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The last choice that we have here is man,
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which is short for manual
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that shows us what a command does,
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a description of the command and
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gives us a lot of good information on what we can
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do with respect to different switches and
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things of that nature with
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those commands that we put after man.
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In summary, in this very brief lesson today,
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we discussed the following.
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The man command, the cat command,
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echo, nano, id, df,
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and password or passwd for short.
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All of those are important because man has
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given us instructions on how to use commands.
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Cat gives us outputs if we don't want to
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open the file or look in a text editor.
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Echo is going to allow us to do
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some things like write scripts,
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display information, output information.
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It's a great command to have in your toolchest.
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Nano is great for editing text files,
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but it's not the only text editor out there.
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Id is great for understanding permissions,
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df is good for understanding
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disk space utilization and
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where we might be able to clean some things up,
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and passwd is fundamental in ensuring that we change
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our password or that we don't
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use default credentials on a system.
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I know that that was brief but I
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enjoyed having you here today,
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and I look forward to seeing you again soon.
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