Hello. Today we're going to be talking
about file organization for a small

penetration test company. What is a pen
test? A pen test is an attack on a

computer or a network for the purposes
of trying to find out what weaknesses

the device(s) happen to have so that they
can be taken care of before the bad guys

try to attack. Pen tests are conducted
with legal written permission by the of

the owners of the attacked devices. So
this company has just started conducting

penetration tests. They've got five
clients so far and they have started to

create a number of different files for
each of the different clients they have.

For example, a nondisclosure agreement or
NDA that pretty much says we won't let

anybody else other than the owners of
the devices know what we found out, so

we're not going to tell anybody, "Hey, this
company has these weaknesses." They have

the letter with written permission to be able
to conduct the tests; this one permission

is sometimes called informally a
"get-out-of-jail-free card." The pen

testers have been taking notes as
they've been conducting the tests and

they've developed a final report and
they have all this documentation on each

of the different clients. Now at this point, I

have all the relevant files in a
directory that's inside my home

directory. I'd like to copy all of that
information into the directory we happen

to be in at the moment. The command to
copy things is "cp," and because we're

going to be copying a directory, we're
going to throw in the -r. Next, we

have to say what it is we'd like to copy. We'd like to copy files that are in my

home directory . The tilde ~ represents the
home directory, and I'm going to start

typing the name of the directory that
we'd like to copy. It begins with an

"f" - it's "files for video". As it happens I
only have one particular item in

my home directory that begins with the
letter "f," so I'm going to hit the tab key

now to autocomplete this relatively long
name. I just happened to delete the slash

that came at the end. When you hit "tab"
and you have the name of a

directory, the name will end with a
slash / , so you can keep typing

additional information. As it happens, I
don't wish to type anything else, so I just

deleted this /. It really doesn't matter
whether you have that there or not. I'd like

to copy that information into our
current directory. cp always requires two

arguments; basically, you're saying, "copy
what where": What do I wish to copy? The

directory "files for video". Where do I
want to copy it? Here. A single dot . , as

you'll recall, represents "Here. The
current directory." and if I do an ls

right now, I can see that I do, in fact,
have a "files for video" directory. I'm now

going to switch into my "files for video,"
directory, so I type "cd f" and I

hit the tab. Now you'll notice that
everything that begins with "f" in this

directory goes on to have an "il" as the next two characters, so Linux was able to

autocomplete the "il," but it
doesn't know at this point: Do I want to

keep typing "es" for "files"? Do I want to type the "lters" for "filters"? It doesn't know, so I'm going

to give it an "e" and hit tab. It fills in
the "s" for us. If I hit an "f" it'll in the rest of the "for." Hit "v," hit tab again and it fills in the rest of

"video," so you can see that you can hit
tab multiple times. So now my "files for

video" is my active directory and I'm
going to take a look inside it and I see

that I've got a fair number of files
here. Now if we are only ever going to be

having five clients then everything
could stay in one directory,

but we're starting to realize that -- wait
a minute -- we're going to have a whole lot

more clients coming up, and this
directory that we have is just going to be

getting larger and larger and larger,
and it's going to become less and less

easy to be able to find the files that
we would like, so we better come up with

some sort of an organization so that
we'll be able to find the files that we

wish quickly and easily. There are a
couple of different approaches we could

take with these particular files. One
approach -- and the one we're going to be

using -- looks like this. I've ignored all
the directory structure that's not

relevant to us at the moment. We are in
the CIS one forty-one directory. We're

going to create a directory for all of
our pen test information. I'm just

calling it "PT" for "pen test," and then we're
going to have a separate directory for

each of our different clients. Within
each of the client directories, we'll

have the relevant information -- our
get-out-of-jail-free card, our

non-disclosure agreement, the running
notes, and the final pen test report. We

could have organized things in a different
way; instead of organizing by client, we

could have organized by type of
information. So we could have put all of

our get-out-of-jail free cards in one
directory all of our NDAs in another

directory, and so forth. On both this and
the past slide, some details are omitted

just so that the slides wouldn't get too
cluttered. So the client information for

the notes and the reports
directories were omitted here. Up here,

the information for the specific files
underneath client3 and for client5

have been omitted, but you can
extrapolate what they would be. So okay,

we're going to have to create some
directories. We'll start off by creating

the PT directory for our pen tests. The
command to create a directory is mkdir.

It's pronounced "make dir," but it's
spelled mkdir. OK, so we've created our

pen test directory. You can see I've just
executed another ls, and we can see our

pen test directory PT. Inside this
directory, we're going to be creating a

directory called "client1,"

so 
mkdirPT /client1 
Now when we go to move our files, we can

shorten their names as well. We no longer
have to have "PT" and "client1" as part

of the name of each of these files
because we can get the information that

it's about a pen test and it's for
client one just from our directory

structure. So the syntax of the command
to move files is very similar to the

syntax of the command for copying. The
command for moving is "mv" and it's

"move what where": What are we going to be moving? We're going to be moving our PT client one's get-out-of-jail-free card. Where are we going to be moving it? We're

going to be moving it into the PT
directory -- inside there into the client1

sub directory -- and from there we're
going to call the file simply GooJFC for

"get-out-of-jail-free card." We can execute an ls command, and we can see that we no

longer have the get out of jail free
card for client one in our current

directory. If we do an ls for our PT/client1 directory, you can see that in

fact we do have the file with the
shortened name inside the directory. Now

we're going to do the same thing for
each of our other three client1 files.

I'm going to use the up arrow to
retrieve my most recent mv command and

I'm using the left arrow and the
backspace to move to where I need to be

and to delete the letters I don't want in
here. This is just a quicker way of

coming up with the command rather than having to type it all again by hand. Up arrow

notes and report. I'm going to clear the
screen screen quickly with the ctrl^L

keyboard shortcut, and ls shows us that we no longer have client1

files in the current directory, but if we
do a ls of PT/client1, we can see that

we have all of the files that we had
before in our client1 directory. Now

okay, we're going to go ahead and create
a client2 directory mkdir PT/client2

and we could copy all of the files here individually into that

directory; so we could, for example, say 
mv PTclient2GooJFC Pt/client2/GooJFC

and we could

do that similar sort of thing for all of
the remaining files. There is, however, a

faster way to accomplish our task. We
could we'd once again start out saying

mv PTclient2 but now instead
of listing an end of each individual

file we can use an asterisk; the
asterisk says, "substitute here any zero

or more characters," so just in this one
phrase 
PTclient2*

it's as if here we typed all of the files whose names begin with

PTclient2 
Where do we want to put them? we want to put them in PT/client2

to let's verify that we did what we
wanted to do. ls. We don't see anything

about client2 in our current directory.
ls PT/client2
We have all four of out

client2-related files within our
client2 directory. Now, the downside of

this is that we would need to rename the
NDA, the notes, and the report file if we

so desired to shorten up the names. In
the interests of not boring you I'm not

going to go through and shorten all
those right now. In real life we might

or might not choose to do so. At this
point, I'm going to very quickly create

client three, four, and five directories
and put the relevant files into them. So

mkdir PT/client3 PT/client4 PT/client5

You can use the "mkdir" command with

multiple different arguments, so that's
just created the client3, client4, and

client5 directories within our PT
directory. I'm now going to move all the

relevant files for client3 into the
client3 directory, client 4 into the client4 directory, and client 5 into the client5 directory.
directory if I do a quick LS I can see I

I don't have any ordinary files inside my
current directory; I could do an

ls PT/client3 PT/client4 PT/client5 
if I so desired, but ls actually has a nice

option of -R 
The capital R says< "show me a recursive listing." What this

means is this is saying not only show me
what's immediately inside the PT

directory, but if there are any
directories in the PT directory, show me

their contents and if there are any
directories within their contents, show

its contents all the way down the
directory structure. So now we can see

all at once that the PT directory
contains the client1 through client5

directories and we can see the contents
of each of the individual client

directories. I'll say as an aside that
there are ways that you would be able to

shorten the names to remove the PT
client in a fashion that's more

efficient than just doing it by hand. How you would do that, though, is

beyond the scope of this discussion. OK, I
just cleared the screen again and I'm

going to cd into the PT directory and
make a new directory for a hypothetical

client six. and I'm going to
cd into the client6 directory. One

command that is very useful if you would
just like to create an empty file -- in

fact it's the command that I use to
create all the files we've worked with

today -- that's the "touch" command. So I
could say 
touch NDA

and I've created an empty 0 bytes file called NDA.

I'm going to be switching topics a little
bit so that I can talk about a couple of

other things that I did wish to talk
about in this video. So this is not

directly pentest related, but suppose for
some reason you wish to have the

calendar -- the output of the cal command
-- display not on your screen, but put it

into a file. You can redirect the output
of the "cal" command. This is saying, "Don't

show me the calendar -- the output of the
cal command -- on the screen. Instead, put

it into a file that we're going to call
'calendar'." We now have a calendar file, and

if we use the "cat" command to display the
contents of the calendar file, we can see

that it is in fact the calendar for the
month in which I'm recording this video.

Maybe we'll have another file that's
going to show the output of the "date"

command and we'll just call that file
"day," and a cat of day reveals that it

does in fact give us the output of the
date command. Why am I creating these

files? It's because I'd like to show you
something about the mv command that

also applies to the cp command and is
very important. We've seen a couple of

ways in which the mv or the cp commands
can be used. With "copy what where," if "where"

is the name of a file that does not
exist, cp or mv will create a file by

that name with the contents of the
original file. So if i say cp x y then both of them will have

identical content. If the "where" is the
name of a directory, what we saw

mv command holds true with the cp

command, that the "copy what where," if the "where" is s directory it will take the

"what" file specified and it will create a file within

the specified directory with the
contents of that file, so if I said 
cp x y

with "y" being the name of a directory,
what will result is there's going to be

a file called y/ x with the x in the x
directory containing the same content as

the original file named x. There's a
third possibility, though. The first

possibility was the "what" was the name of
a file that did not yet exist. The second

possibility was the name of a directory. The third possibility

is the name of a file that does exist. Suppose we decided to

take information from "cal" and "date" and
put it into a single file. I'm just going

to call "when". So we can move the contents of our "day" file into a file called "when".

We no longer have a file called "day." The
file called "when" now has the output of

the date command.Now watch very carefully: this is what I wanted to show you.

If I type 
mv calendar when 
-- "when" is a file that already exists; it

contains the output of the date command -- 
this is what's currently in the "when" file.

I did not get any error messages. mv was
perfectly happy to move the contents of

calendar into the "when" file. An ls command shows again we no longer have

a "calendar" file, but look at the contents
of the "when" file. You see what happened

in the calendar file, but the information
from the output of the "date" file -- what had

been in the "when" file before we copied
the calendar contents into "when" -- that is

gone, and this is the important caveat: If
you're using mv or you're using cp

and the second argument is the name of a
file that exists, that file's original

contents will be replaced with the
contents of whatever was in the first

argument, so be very careful with cp and
mv. OK, so we've created quite a number of

different files here and I'd like to
clean up all the files that we worked

with today. They're just ones that were
created for this video; there's really no

pen test company. I'm going to clean up
the files, so the first thing I'd like to

do would be to delete the directory that
I'm in right now and all of its contents.

To delete a directory use the "rmdir"
command. I'm going to

try to delete the directory I'm in right
now and this period is usually used to

mean "here". We saw it in an action earlier
when we said cp -r cis141 .

We're saying copy that

one directory here. Dot (.) is a perfectly
valid argument for many commands, but

it's not valid for the "rmdir" command, and
there's a reason for it which you could

probably figure out on your own if you
stopped to think for a moment. If we deleted

the directory we were in, where would we
be? We just got rid of the directory we

were currently in and we have to be in
some directory so rmdir basically

says you can't delete the directory
you're in, so I'm going to go up one

level and I'm going to try deleting my client6

directory and rmdir still is not
going to be very happy. It's saying the

directory is not empty; you've got files
in it, so we can delete all those files.

we could type in rm -- the command to
delete a file -- client6/NDA and we

could type in rm client6/when, and
now we can try again rmdir client6

Because we deleted everything inside
client6, client6 was an empty directory.

Because client6 is now an empty directory,

rmdir we'll go ahead and delete it without any complaints.

An ls shows us we no longer have a client6
directory. Suppose we wish to delete

client5's directory and the first
thing we wanted to do was to delete

everything that's inside the client5
directory. Stop and think a minute to see

if you can figure out how you could
delete everything in there all in one

line. Just a reminder: the contents of the
client5 directory. Well, one thing we

could do would be to type in
rm client5/ this-filename client5/this-filename client5/this-filename

That would be a lot of typing. Another
thing we could do will be to type in

rm client5/*
That removes everything that's inside client5. Now in

this particular case, that's exactly what
we wanted to have happen, but be very

careful with that asterisk, especially
when you're using it in

with a command such as "rm." If we had
had a file in the client5 directory

that we did, in fact, wish to preserve, it's
too late. It's gone, and there is no trash

bin or recycle bin or anything along
those lines from which to be able to

retrieve the data. It's not there
anymore. One thing that we could do -- I'm

going to go ahead and rmdir client5. With a client4 we could say rm -i client4/*

What client that -s is saying is

"Be interactive about your
deletions -- ask me, for each individual

file, "'Do you really wish to remove this?'"
I do wish to remove all of them, but

you can see that this provides a little
bit of a safety net to make sure that

we're really not deleting anything we
don't wish to

have deleted. So now I'm going to go
ahead and delete client4, and if we

wanted, we could do the same things with
clients3, client2 and client1, but there's an easier way of doing

things if you know for a fact that you wish to remove not only the directory,
but everything underneath the directory.

Any ordinary files or directory files
inside it any directory files that are

in directory files, that are inside it
all the way down -- you know for a fact you

wish to get rid of everything. Instead of
removing them the rmdir command,

you can use rm -r. rm -r, as you can see, works even

if the directory contains data, and it's
nice to be able to have both methods of

being able to delete directories. If you
know for 100% certain

that you do wish to
delete not only directory but everything

underneath it, you can do so with rm -r, but that is very powerful.

If you have any hesitation whatsoever, if
you want to make sure that you're just

removing empty directories, rmdir is the
command for you. I'm going to go up a
directory and say rm -r PT

you'll note that at this point the PT directory contains two
subdirectories which in turn contain a

bunch of different files. all of which
are now gone. So what we have seen so far

today is how you can copy and
move the files. You can create an empty file

with the touch command. We've seen that rmdir will

remove an empty directory. rm -r will
remove a directory that may or may not

be empty. If you wish to have an
interactive way of working with rm, you

could use -i. We've seen that an asterisk
can substitute for

any zero or more characters, and again
the asterisk is extremely powerful but

you have to be careful with it. The
asterisk is an example of what is sometimes called

a "globbing character." Another globbing
character is a question mark, and that

says, "Substitute exactly one character."
Instead of "Substituting here zero

or more," substitute exactly one. So
we've also talked a little bit as an

aside about what pen testing is and some
of the documentation -- not all but some of

the documentation -- that is involved in
pen testing. That was just an added bonus.

If you have any questions, please do feel
free to ask your teacher and do be

prepared -- if you are one of the Delaware
Technical Community College CIS 141

students for whom this video
was created -- do be prepared to come

into the classroom and to be able
to conduct various organizations of

groups of files. So we've seen one
example here. Are there any other

principles for organizing files? There actually are

a variety of different tips I'd like to
talk about, some of which we've already

made mention of; others of which we have
not. One is when you're organizing files,

it's a good idea to keep data files
separate from application files. One

reason for this is that data files are
going to be backed up much more

frequently than application files, and by
keeping them separate, it makes it easier

to execute a backup strategy.

You also want to have consistency in naming conventions for files and for folders or directories. We don't want to have client1

for one directory and PTclient2 for
another and thirdclient for a third. If

we're using client followed by number, we
want to keep that throughout.

You want your names to be short but descriptive. You don't want to have great big lengthy

things that, as you saw in our example, can
be kind of hard to read and take a while to

type, so make them fairly short. Use
common abbreviations (I used PT for

"pen test") and if a folder/directory -- I
put in "folder" here because these tips

are not Linux specific, they apply
equally to Windows or to any other

operating system -- but if you do see your
container object (whatever it's called)

start to have too much information and
it starts to become unwieldy, create

subfolders and sub-directories. A few
possible ways you can organize things

are completed versus incomplete, so if
you've got different files for different

projects, when you've finished a
particular file -- you've done the work

that is involved with that file -- you can
move it from the "incomplete" to the

"completed" directory. You might organize
things by file type, so you'll have all of

your workbooks together, all your
documents in a separate directory, all of

your slideshows in a third. You might
wish to organize things by project -- that

is, in essence, what we did here -- where we
had client1, client2, client3, and

each client involved a separate pen test.
If you're dealing with Windows,

put your documents in the document folder, create subfolders within the "Document" folder.

You can use jump lists. I'm going
to be panning down on my screen so that

you can see my taskbar so I can
demonstrate a jump list. If I right-click

on one of the icons in the taskbar, what
shows up is a jump list. These are my

pinned items, these are ones that are
going to be staying on my list even if I

haven't happened to use them in a while. 
these are files that I've recently used. As I

added new files, open up new files, the
older ones will drop from the list. If

I'd like to make sure that something
stays on this list, I can pin it by

clicking on the pushpin. I can unpin
a pinned item by clicking on the push pin

again. You might wish use the recent
items on the start menu, but if for security

reasons you don't wish to have a "recent
items" on the start menu or you don't

wish to have a jump list, there
are ways of getting rid of those as well.

If you have certain files that you open
very, very, very frequently, you might wish

to create a desktop shortcut in
Windows to the particular item. That way,

you can go to it directly without having
to navigate the folder structure. If you

are trying to find particular files, you
can go into "computer" and for our

discussion right now. I'd actually like
to talk a little bit about how things

are set up at Del Tech. We have a u: drive
that teachers can add information to or

make changes to. Students can look at and can copy files from it, but they're not

allowed to make changes. I think the
u: drive is an excellent example of

organization. Even if you've never looked
at the u: drive before, if you know that

this video is for our CIS 141
class, you'd be able to just glance at

the names of these folders. They're very
short but they're descriptive. You should

be able to figure out that this is the folder
that you would be interested in. If you

happen to know
that my last name is "Mancini," you'd be

able to look at these and you'd be able
to zero in on exactly which folder would

have information that is relevant, and
then from here again you can go into the

relevant folder. At this point, I'd like
to look at the folder that just says

"Windows." This contains a number
of miscellaneous files for the purposes

of practicing organization. Again,
this is a relatively small number of

files in this folder, but pretend that
there were quite a number and we wish to

find a particular one. I happen to be in
the "Details" view right now. You can

change your view by going to the View
menu. You're going to "Details." If you

don't happen to see your view menu, you
could go to the drop-down list for

"Organize," and choose "Layout," and you'll be able to see your menu bar, then you can

bring up the View menu. We're
currently in the details view now. The

nice thing about the details view -- or one
of the nice things beyond the fact that

it gives you a lot more information
about all the different files -- is that

you can organize things quickly. If you
knew that the file you were interested

in was one that had been modified fairly
recently, you can click on "Date Modified,"

and if you click on it once, it organizes
things from the most recently to the

least recently modified files. These
files haven't been modified in quite a

while. If you click on it again, it
reverses the organization. If you knew

that you wished to get rid of some files --
maybe you're running out of space -- and

you wanted to see if are there a couple of
really large files that you wish to get

rid of, you could sort by size. The
default order is sorting by name, and if

you happen to have a mixture of both
files and folders, the folders by default

will show up first a through , then the
ordinary files a through z. So, again, I

hope you found these tips useful. Keep
them in mind. Again, if you happen to be a

CIS 141 student at Delaware
Technical Community College, be sure to

practice the commands that we discussed
earlier in this video: cp, mv, touch, the ls with the -R option, rmdir, rm -r, the

-i option, rm without any options. Practice the globbing

character, the asterisk. Be prepared to
come into class and be able to do

something similar to what was done in
this particular presentation.You will be

given a directory that has a lot of
files, and that you are going to have to try

to come up with an appropriate
organization for. Again, I hope you found

this video interesting and useful and
informative. If you have any questions,

please do speak with your instructor