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PicoCTF First Find Writeup: Locating a Secret File with find

A beginner-friendly picoCTF walkthrough using unzip, find, and cat to locate and read a deeply nested secret file.

Apr 16, 20242 min readAdapted from my picoCTF notes
PicoCTFGeneral SkillsLinuxfind

First Find is a picoGym general skills challenge about navigating a large extracted directory tree. The task is to find a file named uber-secret.txt.

Extracting the Archive

unzip files.zip

Unzip output

Finding the File

The find command is the cleanest way to search recursively by filename:

find /home/waaris_m/Downloads/files -type f -name "uber-secret.txt"

find output

Reading the Flag

cat /home/waaris_m/Downloads/files/adequate_books/more_books/.secret/deeper_secrets/deepest_secrets/uber-secret.txt

cat output

Key Takeaways

  1. find is the right tool when the directory tree is too large to inspect manually.
  2. Hidden directories are normal filesystem entries; recursive search will still find files inside them.
  3. General skills challenges reward comfort with basic Linux commands.