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Linux command line in Mr Robot. Showing some accurate Linux usage.

Linux command line usage in the show Mr Robot.

Linux command line in Mr Robot. This directory listing is showing a few files under the /opt/2/task/2/fd1info directory. The fsociety file is the one he was looking for. This file is only 4096 bytes in size, so does not contain too much juicy information. Or does it?

The screenshot below, shows a computer store in 1994, that is selling machines with Windows™ 3.1 on them. Not anachronistic for the time period. The first Windows machine I use was running Windows 3.0. That was quite different from the DOS command prompt that I was used to at the time.

Computer store selling Windows 3.1 machines.

There is also accurate usage of the find command and SSH.

Using the find command in Mr Robot.

Here, the person is making use of the Linux find command to search for files on the Linux filesystem.

The find / -type d 1> /dev/null 2> command is wrong though, all the successful finds are redirected to /dev/null. If you want to list all folders on a system, you would use this command: find / -type d 2> /dev/null. That will list all of the directories on the system. The SSH command above is correct though. I guess we do not see the full find command. That is a good point. This is a proper command for finding all directories.

 sudo find / -type d 2> /dev/null

This sends all errors to /dev/null, but returns all successful finds.

Using the SSH command to login to a server.

It is very good that we are seeing more accurate Linux usage in modern TV shows. There are some strange uses of technobabble, but mostly the displays of Linux usage are accurate. That is very surprising for a modern TV show, most television shows use very dumb examples of computer usage. And this is the person responsible apparently…

1 thought on “Linux command line in Mr Robot. Showing some accurate Linux usage.”

  1. He doesn’t finish typing the command, but this means “find all files on the entire filesystem which are directories, and ignore the output, and send any error output [somewhere]”. Since there’s no output between this command and the next one, he presumably sends it to a file. The most common error output for the find command is a permission error, which means the user can’t access a certain directory. Since these directories probably contain more sensitive or critical data, this command makes sense.

    >vi /tmp/noaccess

    /tmp/noaccess is where he must have redirected the error output in the last command, and sure enough, it contains a bunch of find errors.

    >ls -l /opt/2/task/2/fd1nfo

    This makes no sense, because he got a permission error with find for this directory, so there’s no way the ls command would succeed.

    >ls -l fsociety

    This directory is supposed to be in /opt/2/task/2/fd1nfo, but he issues the command from the filesystem root (/), so this doesn’t make sense either.

    Reply

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