Bash for Hackers: Creative Shell Scripting for Pentesters & Red-Team Operators
Bash for Hackers is the definitive, hands-on guide to weaponizing the Bash shell for real-world offensive security operations. Written for pentesters, red-team operators, and security professionals, this book shows you how to transform simple command-line skills into a complete automation toolkit capable of reconnaissance, exploitation, persistence, privilege escalation, and post-exploitation.
Bash remains one of the most powerful tools in the offensive security world because it is available everywhere. Whether you land a foothold through SSH, a reverse shell, or a misconfigured web service, Bash is already waiting for you. This book teaches you how to use it to automate attacks, build modular red-team frameworks, generate payloads, pivot across networks, and control compromised systems with speed and precision.
Designed with clarity and practicality in mind, every chapter walks you through actionable, field-tested scripts that you can run directly in your lab. You will learn how to craft efficient one-liners, analyze environments, automate privilege escalation checks, create lightweight recon scanners, deploy persistence mechanisms, exfiltrate data, and build complete multi-stage attack chains. Nothing is theoretical-every technique is demonstrated through clean, reproducible Bash code.
Inside you will learn how to:
- Build a hardened attacker environment using Bash-optimized configurations
- Create recon modules for host discovery, port scanning, service enumeration, and banner collection
- Develop fileless exploit delivery scripts and automated brute-force workflows
- Generate reverse shells, bind shells, encrypted payloads, and obfuscated command chains
- Automate privilege escalation checks, PATH hijacking, SUID enumeration, and kernel vulnerability discovery
- Construct persistence mechanisms using cron, systemd services, SSH keys, stealth aliases, and hidden startup scripts
- Execute post-exploitation techniques including credential harvesting, log extraction, token collection, compression, encoding, and exfiltration
- Build multi-target attack automation systems capable of scanning, exploiting, persisting, and pillaging with minimal input
- Produce structured reports and cleanup routines for professional red-team engagements
The book concludes with complete red-team automation projects that tie everything together, showing you how to build modular frameworks for reconnaissance, exploitation, persistence, and long-term access-using nothing but Bash.
Whether you are a pentester looking to sharpen your offensive scripting skills, a red-team operator seeking to automate repetitive tasks, or a defensive engineer wanting to understand attacker workflows at the command-line level, this book gives you the knowledge and tools to operate with confidence and clarity.
Bash for Hackers is not just a scripting book. It is a full operational playbook for command-line driven offensive security. Read it with your lab open-because you will be scripting, testing, and hacking from the very first chapter.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks® and the ThriftBooks® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
