hashcat combination attack odd even difference

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sometimes it looks like its doing just single words it can occour in cases you have empty lines in your dictionary. it also can occour when you have words in your dictionary that are to long for hashcat to parse. in that case, it skips them which then will change the total number of combinations. you can use the len.bin utility in hashcat-utils for example to make sure yyour dictionary contains only words of length 4-8 and then try it again.