chmod +x <filename>
Makes a file runnable - chmod changes permissions of a file.
./<filename>
Run a file.
file <filename>
View file type and information.
strings <filename>
Print all printable strings in a file.
nc <host> <port>
Use netcat to connect to a remote host. This is very common in the pwn category and other remote challenges.
xxd <filename>
View the hex dump of a file using xxd.
base64 -d <filename>
Decode a Base64-encoded file.
Browser developer tools
Found in most browsers by pressing [F12].
Here you can view the network traffic, cookies, page source code and more.
robots.txt
Most web pages has this file, located at www.example.com/robots.txt.
This is to prevent web crawlers from traversing certain places of a web page.
Hidden paths and information may be found here.
gdb
The Gnu debugger, built into most Linux systems.
OllyDbg
IDA Pro
radare2
ghidra
Python
C/C++
bash
perl
ruby
PHP
#!/usr/bin/python2
# This is just an example...
from pwn import *
io = remote(host='127.0.0.1', port=1337)
io.recvline() # Receive a line of text
payload = "AAAAAAAAAA"+shellcode
io.sendlineafter(": ", payload) # Combination of recvuntil(delimiter) and sendline()