Co0l Linux trick: Hide files in an image

[tonybaldwin]

Here's a cool trick I just learned.
You can, in a gnu/linux system, hide files within an image file.
Why you might want to do so, of course, is open to speculation, but the "how" is really rather simple.

1. Choose an image file, any image file. For this example, I will choose a wallpaper I made, say, debianolive.png. Copy this image to a directory with the documents you wish to hide.


2. Compress the files or documents you wish to hide. This is simple enough. In terminal do:
   :~$ zip secretfiles.zip file1 file2
   


3. Then, in terminal, simply do:
   cat debianolive.png secretfiles.zip > debianolive.png

All done.

This creates an image with the name "debianolive.png", which contains our documents.
When we wish to retrieve said documents, we rename the file to debianolive.zip
:~$ mv debianolive.png debianolive.zip
Then unzip:
:~$ unzip debianolive.zip
and you have your files back.

Handy! Nifty!
Enjoy!

./tony