I have a mask that must have 2 dashes at the very end but if I specify a mask of ?l?l— then it increments through ?l then ?l?l then ?l?l- before it gets to the format I need. Is it possible to stop the incrementing feature so it reads dictionary for left and then starts with the full mask for right?
If I'm understanding you correctly, couldn't you just leave out --increment?
Yeah, but then it would check just the ?l?l-- but not check the ?l--. The most easy way is to write it to a mask file and have two lines in it.
With "reads dictionary for left" I think they're doing -a 6, and they want the mask on the right-hand side to simply be '?l?l--'. So just a single mask, no mask file required (hashcat -a 6 wordlist.txt ?l?l--)