Read command options from file
#1
Would anybody find it useful if the hashcats could take their command options from reading a file?

E.g., hashcat @test1.hc would read the file test1.hc which could have the actual commands and options that would've been on the command line.

Would that bypass the issues with how Linux or Windows parses special characters on the command line?

Would it help for scripting the running of many sequential scenarios? E.g.
hashcat @test1.hc
hashcat @test2.hc
hashcat @test3.hc
#2
Although this may (depending on implementation) be one way of addressing special character sequences on the command line, it is trivial to simply properly escape your characters on the command line, and may ultimately be a bit more obvious when you are running your cracks.

An alternative is that you could just write your own wrapper to parse a config file and insert the correct settings as appropriate. It''s not very difficult to do.
#3
Something similar asked a while ago, it was rejected, so seems there is some reason to not to implement.
#4
There was no good reason to do it. You can do all the same shell/batch script.