FatMinMin

When playing CTF, it is often to use a dash character to get an interactable shell after pwning a binary.

cat payload - | ./binary

# is the same as
cat payload /dev/stdin | ./binary

Other commands such as wget also use dash to represent stdout.

wget fatminmin.com -O -

# is the same as
wget fatminmin.com -O /dev/stdout

Another example is socat.

# stream TCP-LISTEN:5566 to ./a.out binary
socat TCP-LISTEN:5566,fork EXEC:./a.out

# - is used to stream input/output from TCP-LISTEN:5566 to stdin/stdout
socat TCP-LISTEN:5566,fork -

I used to think it is a convention supported by shells such as bash and zsh. However, I recently found out that it is a convention supported by individual UNIX programs not by the shells as stated in the following links.

Reference:

• Usage of dash (-) in place of a filename
• dash redirect from stdin to stdout