Draft:Intermediate Prohibited Files

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Author(s): Matthias Lee (ml2322)
Last Updated: 07-07-2025

Recommended Prerequisites (click to expand)
Introductory Prohibited Files

More efficient strategies to find prohibited files

find

The find command is a powerful tool to search the system for files matching certain criteria. To find prohibited files with it, we can use the -name argument to search for all files with a specific extension. To do this, we can use a wildcard like -name "*.mp3" to find everything that ends in .mp3. However, we still need to tell find where to look. For example, to search for all MP3 files in /home, the command would be find /home -name "*.mp3". NOTE: * is a special character in bash, so you need to put it in quotes.

user@system:/home/user$ sudo find /home -name "*.wav"
/home/jacob/Audio/heyy_john.wav

Additionally, prohibited files may not always be in the user home directories. Therefore, it's useful to search other directories or even the whole system sometimes (replace /home with / for the whole system, or some other directory). However, the more broad the search, the longer it will take, and the more false positives you will get.

Remediating protected prohibited files

Prohibited files may sometimes have restrictive permissions to prevent you from deleting them.

Taking ownership of the file

A good first step to delete a file is to take ownership of it with the chown command. For several files, you can use a wildcard to target them all at once. You specify user:user, as you change the user ownership and group ownership to yourself.

user@system:/home/user$ sudo chown user:user *.mp3

Setting permissions

The next step to take control of a file is to enable write permissions on it, with chmod. We will change the permissions to 775 to ensure we are able to delete it.

user@system:/home/user$ sudo chmod 775 *.mp3

Changing attributes

If the above two methods didn't enable you to delete the file, the final thing to try is to remove the immutable and append only attributes with chattr.

user@system:/home/user$ sudo chattr -ia *.mp3

Further Reading

• https://commandmasters.com/commands/chattr-linux/
• https://www.howtogeek.com/437958/how-to-use-the-chmod-command-on-linux/