Mastering Linux: Essential Commands for Aspiring Hackers

Linux empowers aspiring hackers with essential command-line skills and tools for cybersecurity.

### Mastering Linux: Essential Commands for Aspiring Hackers
* 💻 "Linux is an open-source operating system that is extensively used in hacking and cybersecurity due to its **powerful tools and frameworks**."
* 🔍 The video begins by encouraging viewers to **install Kali Linux**, a popular distribution for hackers, before diving into **basic Linux terminal commands**.
* 📂 The Linux terminal, or command line, is highlighted as the **true power of Linux**, contrasting it with the graphical user interface (GUI) that many are accustomed to.
* 📜 Key commands such as **PWD (print working directory)** and **LS (list)** are introduced, allowing users to **navigate and view their current directory and its contents**.
* 🔄 To change directories, the **CD command** is explained, along with how to navigate back using **CD ..** and how to remove files with the **RM command**.
* 📚 The video also covers the structure of the Linux file system, emphasizing that **"everything in Linux is a file,"** including commands themselves.
* 🗂 Important directories like /bin, /sbin, and /usr are explored, revealing where **essential commands and user binaries** are stored.
* 🏠 Finally, the video wraps up by summarizing the main points and encouraging viewers to **continue learning Linux through additional resources**.

ever wondered what it takes to become a major key? The answer lies in mastering a skill that empowers you like no other. Linux is an operating system, just like Windows, but with a crucial distinction: it's open source. Being open source means that its source code is accessible and modifiable by anyone, which is why if you search for Linux distributions on Google, you'll come across various versions of Linux customized by different developers. But why switch to Linux for hacking? What's wrong with Windows or Mac OS? Well, for one, Linux is extensively used in the realm of hacking and cybersecurity, due to which it offers a wide range of powerful hacking tools and frameworks that are not readily available on other operating systems. Furthermore, as an aspiring hacker, whenever you'll search for how to do something that is related to hacking on the internet, you'll likely come across a tutorial or article featuring Linux. That's why in this video, first, we're gonna cover some basic Linux terminal commands that will help you in getting started, and then we'll look at the Linux file system to get an

understanding of how the Linux operating system works. So let's get started. Okay, so what exactly is the Linux terminal, and what do Linux commands even mean? Well, before I get into that, if you don't have a Linux distribution already up and running, I would recommend you pause this video here and go watch a short guide I put together on how to download and install Kali Linux, the Linux distribution used by hackers, on a virtual machine by clicking on the I button above. Anyway, coming back to the topic, you see many Linux distributions, specifically Kali Linux's GUI, which means that it has some attractive icons, a dock, menus, and other stuff, and you can use Linux through these things. But as a hacker, it isn't meant to be used like this. The true power of Linux is that you don't use GUI; you use the Linux terminal, also known as the command line. And the Linux terminal is this guy right here. So go and click on that. So this is Mr. Terminal, and you are supposed to use Linux through him. Now, if you are coming

from the GUI-only world where all you use is a graphical user interface, this might seem a little scary. I totally get it, but don't worry. I'm gonna walk you through this by teaching you a few simple commands. So, go ahead and have your Linux terminal open like this, and also at the same time, open up your home directory right here. So, I'm going to teach you your first commands by doing something here in the GUI and then doing the same thing here in the Linux terminal. Now, what I love about GUI is that you always kind of know where you are because you can see it. Like right now, I'm in my user directory because I can see it right here, and this is all my stuff. But over here in the Linux terminal, I don't see anything. How do I know where I am? Well, we are going to solve it using our first command PWD. PWD stands for print working directory, and it basically does what we see in the GUI here. It tells us where we're at. So, let's try it out. Go ahead and hit enter, and as

you can see it shows us the full path of where we are right now, the home directory, and even further drilling down the user directory, meaning that right now we are in the same spot as our GUI. Now, you might be wondering, Okay, cool, we know where we are, but we still don't see the same stuff in the terminal within the GUI, like folders of desktop, downloads, and stuff. Here comes our next command. Type it with me: LS. LS stands for list, and it simply lists the contents of your current working directory, meaning it will simply list what we see right here in the GUI. So, let's go ahead and hit enter, and boom! As you can see, that everything we could see in the GUI, we can now also see in Mr. Terminal. Now, let's say, What if we need to take a peek inside our desktop folder right here for GUI? We can just double-click on it and see what we have inside it. But how do we do that in the terminal? Well, here comes our next command: CD. CD stands for change directory, and it's going to do exactly

what we just did here. So, let's do it right now after CDL. Hit space and tell it what directory I want to go to. So, let's type in desktop and hit enter. Well, did it work? I don't know. Let's find out using the PWD command. And as you can see, we are indeed in the desktop folder. And to see what is in the desktop folder, like we can see in the GUI, we can simply use the ls command once again. But now, how can we go back like in the GUI? Here, we can just click on the back button and go to the directory we started in. How do we do this in terminal? It's actually pretty easy. So, again, we are going to type in CD, then a space, and put in two dots here. And upon hitting enter, CD dot dot will take us back to our previous directory. Now, back to our desktop directory. How can we remove or delete something like here in the GUI? If I want to remove this file, I can simply right-click on it and select delete to delete it. So, how do we do that here in

the terminal. Well, that's where the RM command comes in. RM stands for remove, and as its name suggests, it can remove a file in the working directory. To use it, just type in RM, hit space, and type in the name of the file you want to remove. Upon hitting enter, you will see that the file we had on the desktop folder is now gone. You can also create a folder in the working directory using the mkdir command. To use it, type in mkdir, space, and then type in the name that you would like to give your folder. As you can see, it created a folder right here on the desktop for us. But now, if we try to remove it with the RM command, it gives us an error. Why is that? Well, that's because this is a directory, and to remove a directory, we also add in a dash R after typing in the RM command, like this. Next, we have the man or man command. What this command does is it displays the user manual of any command that we can run on the terminal. For example, if I

type man and then type in RM followed by a space. It will tell us what this command does and how we can use it. This is a pretty cool and useful command for beginners. Chapter 2: The Linux File System. Okay, so far we've learned a few basic commands like LS, which lists all the things in our current working directory, the CD command, which changes our current directory to somewhere else, the PWD command, which will tell us where we are, and we even saw that if we typed in CD dot dot, it will take us back to where we were. But I wonder where will we end up if we keep going back in the terminal. Let's find out. CD dot dot. Okay, so we are in the home directory. Now let's try CD dot dot once again, and now we are in this forward slash directory. Now if we try to go back once again, you'll notice that we are still in this forward slash directory. Why is that? Well, that's because we have reached the end. So what is this forward slash and what does it mean? Well, this slash symbolizes

the root of the file system, and this is basically from where everything in Linux starts. From here, we are also starting the second part of our video, so let's clear our terminal by typing in the clear command real quick. Okay, so now what's here? What's at the root of the file system? Let's find out by typing LS. So, we can see a bunch of stuff. Let's look at them one by one, but before we do that, I want to get one big idea across to you real quick, and the big idea is that everything in Linux is a file. I mean everything, from your network settings to your computer's input-output devices. Everything is a file. They are represented as a file in Linux. Now, the even more crazy thing is that the commands we use are also files. But you don't believe me? Let me show you. So, let's jump into this first directory here called bin. CD bin. Bin stands for binary, and as we all know, binary is the language the computer understands. So, inside the bin folder are the command binaries, meaning that the

commands which tell our computer what to do are stored here. So, let's take a look inside by typing LS. And there you go. These are all the commands you'll end up using in Linux. So, let's scroll up and find LS. And as you can see, this sucker is a file. So, basically, the command you use to list files is actually itself a file. Now, you might be wondering that if this is a file, we should be able to bust it open and see what's inside. Well, we can do that. And to do that, we use a new command, cat. What this command is, is it just takes a file and throws the output on our terminal. So, type cat followed by LS like this and hit enter. Well, we got a lot of spit gear. Now, do you understand any of this? Because if you do, you might be a robot. A normal human should not be able to understand any of this as this is the command binary. When you type in LS, this is what it tells the computer to do. Okay, so back to the root of the file.

system we just talked about bin, which stores all of our essential commands, but there's also another directory over here called s bin, or I would like to refer to it as super bin. Now, super bin is just like bin, but it's a bit more special. You see, super bin has some special commands that only system administrators would use to administer the system. Let me show you. So, let's jump into super bin real quick, and if we LS inside super bin, we can see the cool command that only admins could use. Let's take a look at one and actually use it real quick. Let's use this one, add user. And if you haven't guessed already what this command did, is it will add ourselves a new user. So, let's do that real quick. I'm going to clear my screen and then type in add user space and then the name of the user I want to add. Let's go with text, but it gave us an error saying only root may add user to the system. How do we fix that? Well, sometimes in Linux, you have to

say please and to save please in Linux. You'll type in a command called sudo before our add user command. sudo space add user space test. Now we will end up covering what sudo means, but for right now just know that we weren't allowed to use the add user command in this directory as we didn't have permissions. But by using the sudo command, we can pretend to be the root or the admin user for just this one command. So let's try it out now. Every time you use the sudo command, you have to type in the password for the user you are currently logged in as. So go ahead and type in the password, and after hitting enter, the add user command will run and will start creating a user. Next, just give the new user you created a password and skip the rest of the stuff. So we just added a user using the add user command, and these are the type of commands that are located in S Pen or super bin. Now let's get back to root. So now we know that bin has our essential commands and super bin has our

super essential commands, but now we're going to jump into our user or the USR directory. So, let's type in cd usr and then type in ls to see what's inside. Now, do you notice something strange inside the USR directory? We also have a bin and an sbin. So, what's going on here? Do these have the same commands as the bin and sbin in the root directory? Let's take a look inside to find out. Well, bin in the user directory looks the same as bin in the root directory to me. In fact, it is the same as it has the same commands. Now, let's check out if the sbin and user directory also has the same commands of the sbin in the root directory. And yes, they seem to have the same commands here as well. So, what is going on? It seems like we have some imposters here, like which one is the real one, bin in root or bin in the user directory. Well, the answer is both. They're both real. But that begs the question that when we use the ls command, are we using

the command stored in root bin or the USR bin. We can actually find that out using our new command. Where is this command is basically used to find out where our Command binaries live. So let's find out where RLS command actually is, and it is in the user bin and not the root bit. Now let's see where is cat, and it's also in the user bin. The user directory also has some fun stuff like libraries that the command binary share, and apparently it has games. That's fun. Okay, moving forward, let's get back to our root directory now real quick. I'll speed round ooh, what is that? Well, it has all the files that our system needs to boost. VAR will have things like log files and web applications. We will talk more about that later. Temporary or TMP has all the files that go away after our system reboots or something. Okay, speed round done. Let's discuss some more key directories here. First, home. Home is where every user lives on their system. So let's take a look inside CD home. So we can see two homes on our system. One

is our home, and the other is of the user we added earlier. Now, if we CD into the other user's home and LS is stopped, we can see his furniture. Now, earlier I mentioned that even our computer's input-output devices are also filed, and those files are stored here in the dev directory, which stands for devices. The ETC directory, also called the Etsy file here, contains all the settings and configurations of your Linux system. After a few weeks of using Linux, you will go here a lot due to the configuration files of your system being stored here. Next, we only have two more things to cover, and then we are done for today. So, here we have the MNT and the media directory. Now, they both do the same thing, which is mounting drives, but media basically mounts things automatically for you, whereas the MNT directory is there for you to mount drives manually using commands. Anyway, guys, this wraps up the video, summing up what we've learned today. We first saw how we could use our Linux machine through the command line by doing

something in the GUI and performing the same task in the terminal using multiple commands. Then we covered what the main directories of Linux are actually for and where files are stored to gain a good understanding of the Linux operating system itself. Now, as I mentioned earlier in the video, as a hacker, Linux is meant to be used through the command line. That's why I would recommend you to go and watch this video where I cover 40 essential Linux commands in five minutes. With that being said, I wish you all the best on your journey to learn Linux and become a hacker. If you have any questions regarding the video, make sure to ask them in the comments section below, and I will see you in the next one. Foreign [Music]

LINUX BASICS FOR HACKERS

An0n Ali

Linux is an open-source operating system, offering customizable distributions and powerful hacking tools.

It is widely used in hacking and cybersecurity, making it essential for aspiring hackers.

The Linux terminal, or command line, is the key to mastering the operating system, and basic commands like PWD (print working directory) help users navigate and understand their location in the system.

Navigating the Terminal: Essential Commands

The terminal shows the full path of the current directory, mirroring the GUI.

The 'ls' command lists the contents of the current directory, while 'cd' changes the directory.

To remove a file, use the 'rm' command, and to create a folder, use 'mkdir'.

To remove a directory, add '-r' to the 'rm' command.

The 'man' command displays the user manual for any terminal command.

The Linux file system starts with the root directory, represented by a forward slash.

Every element in Linux, including commands, is treated as a file.

The "bin" directory contains command binaries, and the "cat" command can be used to view the contents of these files.

Super Bin is a directory that contains special commands used by system administrators to manage the system.

The add user command, which is used to create a new user, requires root permissions and can be executed with the sudo command.

Using sudo allows a user to temporarily gain administrative privileges for a single command.

Exploring the USR Directory and Key System Directories

The USR directory contains a bin and sbin, which have the same commands as those in the root directory.

The ls command used to list files is actually stored in the user bin.

Other key directories include VAR, which has log files and web applications, TMP for temporary files, and HOME, where every user lives on the system.

Understanding Linux Directories and Commands

The dev directory stores files for input-output devices, while the ETC directory contains system settings and configurations.

The MNT and media directories both handle drive mounting, with media automating the process.

The video emphasizes the importance of using the command line in Linux and recommends watching a video on essential Linux commands.