One of the most exciting things as an ethical hacker, in my opinion, is catching a reverse shell. But often these shells are limited, lacking the full power and functionality of a proper terminal. Certain things don't work in these environments, and they can be troublesome to work with. Luckily, with a few commands, we can upgrade to a fully interactive shell with all the bells and whistles.
It can often be frustrating when working with reverse shells if all you have is a "dumb" shell. A dumb shell is a type of shell that doesn't have the full functionality of a proper terminal. That means things like tab completion, keyboard shortcuts, and terminal history simply aren't present.
Specific commands like su will not work in dumb shells, which can make things complicated when trying different privilege escalation techniques. Text editors don't work very well in these conditions either, which can be a pain.
Perhaps the most annoying thing that can happen (I'm sure it's happened to many of you) is accidentally losing your session by hitting the wrong keys. Let's say you run a command, and it hangs, and you instinctively hit Control-C to cancel it. Well, there goes your shell. It can be infuriating, especially if there were a lot of steps to get that shell.
With a little command-line magic, we can get around this limitation, though, and come out on top with a fully functional interactive shell.
