Lion Cipher Lab
Managing files from the command line
- Foundations
- Beginner
- ~40 min
- Free · no account required
Why it matters
Almost every hands-on security task starts by finding, reading, or moving a file, and most of the time there is no window to click — just a text prompt. Copying a log off a box, hunting for the one line that mentions an error, deleting a file you no longer need: these are the everyday moves a SOC analyst, pentester, or cloud engineer makes without thinking. Learn them once and every later lab stops fighting you, because they all assume you can already do this.
What you'll learn
- command-line navigation
- creating and organizing files
- copying and moving files
- safe deletion
- finding files and searching their contents
- wildcards
Steps in this lab
- Know where you are before you touch anything (pwd, cd, ls)
- Make a workspace and a file to practice on (mkdir, touch)
- Put some text in a file, so there's something to manage
- Copy, move, and rename (cp, mv)
- Delete — the one command to respect (rm)
- Read a file without opening an editor (cat, less, head, tail)
- Find files by name, search inside them, and use wildcards (find, grep, *)
- This is the boring skill everything else is built on