And if it can would a text editor like vi reveal the code?

...

Here's something you can "play" with.
I think the OP confused about what obfuscated is or means.

Here's a site to read up on what text can do...https://aw-snap.info/

Malware is software, therefore it must be executed. (And, once executed, it must be capable of malice using your privileges alone.)

A true .txt file is not executable, but some operating systems consider only the "magic bytes" within the file, not its extension. If the content appears to be an executable program – regardless of its misleading-to-humans .txt extension – they might conceivably try to execute it.

However, "basically, 'no.'"

Remember: this is not biology we are talking about! While you can "catch" a cold by walking into the wrong elevator, your computer cannot. Unlike, say, a yellow fever organism that's lurking in the ground of a graveyard, malware cannot "hide" anywhere, nor can it "infect" anything.

No I was aware that malware can "mask" itself as a text file, but I was wondering if there were any more methods so to speak. But yeah thanks guys I'll check out that link, but I have no idea what to do with that code lol (do I put that in a script?). And thanks Sundial good to know, i'll just make sure their not executable and do some online scans, or maybe just keep them on a Raspberry Pie.

One case I can think of is if a text file has vim commands inside it.

IIRC there is a way one can put vim commands inside of a text file. When you edit the text file with these commands, the commands auto execute from vim.

I forgot how to do that, but I suppose one can do some nasty things that way.

You can also disable this globally in your ~/.vimrc

Hmmm interesting, I'll definitely look into that thanks a lot.

From the command line, shells can be told to attempt to execute any file with the x (execute) permission set. If this is not a binary file and there isn't a "magic" #! then generally the system will attempt to use the users default shell as the interpreter.

So despite what others have said it is ENTIRELY possible for malware to "hide" within a .txt file. Especially if it's distributed as a tarball or some other archive format that can preserve file permissions.

Whether you actually EXECUTE that file is another matter.

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Oh, and as a follow up to my previous post:

Not necessarily. Take this highly simplistic text file:

While I'm sure you can work it out, other than it's attempting to create and execute something in /tmp it's not entirely obvious what the actual end result will be.

If I was designing an exploit, I'd aim at somewhere where everyone said it was impossible. Not that I'm that smart, but there are plenty of others who are.

Thanks TenTenths good stuff but that would still be noticeable in a .txt file (unless it's text file of command notes, or something). Nevertheless pretty cool how it lists directories without the ls command, it's like magic... Im gonna concatenate futher into what these and similar commands do, and see what's going on here, thank you!

Oh believe me that was intentional that it wasn't totally obfuscated It was just to prove my point that malicious code can be almost anywhere!

Note that the "executable" bit does not mean that Linux would automatically attempt to execute it, if merely asked to open the file.

This bit does allow the file to be referenced from the command-line, which is understood to be a request to execute it.

If the file begins with a #!shebang line, this specifically identifies it as a program written in a particular programming language. Otherwise, the shell will attempt to execute it as a script.

And if the file actually contains a copy of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, it won't get far. (However, famously, there was a COBOL compiler which tried to compile it!)

COBOL seems interesting i'm probably going to pick that up along with Lua, Python, and C.. Anyways thanks everyone all very cool stuff!

Under DOS, it was possible for text files to have ANSI escape sequences that would, say, mess up the terminal when you displayed them.