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[-] neidu3@sh.itjust.works 13 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Are you referring to how to manipulate files, or more what the various files and folders do?

EDIT, now that I'm typing on a keyboard (connected to a linux PC, obviously), and not on a phone:

Depends entirely on your definition of fun, really, but the way I learnt it was basically by breaking stuff, sometimes intentionally:

  • Poking/editing files in /etc to see what happened
  • read and write data from/to files in /dev (Careful, these are devicenodes. This is an easy way of overwriting your partition table). As far as I can see, /dev/dsp doesn't exist anymore, but you could cat a .wav file to it and it'd play through the soundcard. I gues modern sound pipelines are a lot more sophisticated hence why I can't find it
  • Play around with redirects and pipes: > >> 2>&1 | 1>/dev/null
  • Get comfortable with file permissions and how to use them. I had many users on this server I had, and I liked to (ab)use the group bit to grant access to various things.
  • Poke every binary in /bin and /sbin to see what they do

:wq

Had no idea that it was such a huge topic :))

Let's start off with something very simple : how to track a particular file existing in your system ?

[-] urushitan@kakera.kintsugi.moe 5 points 2 days ago
find / -iname "filename" 2>/dev/null

Find a file by (case insensitive) file name. Search the whole filesystem (/). Pipe errors to /dev/null (since it will output permission denied errors trying access directories you don’t have access to, among other things)

this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
50 points (100.0% liked)

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