Click the virtual machine below to start practicing
Your progress through the guide is saved. Start a fresh machine to keep practicing.
Time to put pwd, cd, and ls together without step-by-step instructions. Somebody saved the final quarterly report as a hidden file and nobody can find it.
The project directory ~/project holds a tree of client folders. One of them contains a hidden file whose name starts with .report.
pwd, cd, and ls.find, pipes, or wildcards.Your output will differ, but the final checks look like this:
$ ░░░░░░
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 2 learner learner 4096 Oct 18 10:02 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 learner learner 4096 Oct 18 10:02 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 learner learner 35 Oct 18 10:02 .report-final.txt
...
$ ░░░
/home/learner/project/...
cd ~/project/clients/acme/2025/q2
ls -la
pwd
The report is clients/acme/2025/q2/.report-final.txt. Exploring with ls at each level, then ls -a in each leaf directory, is how you find it without find.
You tracked down a hidden file using only the three navigation commands: ls to look around, cd to move, ls -la to reveal hidden files with details, and pwd to confirm where you are.