Filter candidates

[Snoopy]

Is there a way to filter my mask? I am brute-forcing a mask attack with increment, and I first decided to try just alnum (?l?u?d). I now want to try alum and special (?a). Is there any way to run the attack by filtering out candidates where there are no special character?

there is no inbuild filter for that, you could using a maskfile for that, but you have to prepare it by hand

depending on your masklenght (you cannot use --increment in this case) you can use something like this, the example is given for mask lenght 4, i hope you get the point ?1 is first charset alnum, ?2 is second charset ?s (you could switch ?2 for ?s but i think this way it is more visible in the mask, you have to take all combinations into concern

use --stdout to help you prepare all combinations beforehand (windows cli)

hashcat -a3 --stdout -1 12 ???1???1???1???1 > maskfile
open this file, first delete line with ?1 only, for the rest prepend ?u?l?d,?s, to every line, e.g.

?u?l?d,?s,?1?1?2?1
?u?l?d,?s,?2?1?2?1
?u?l?d,?s,?1?2?2?1

you will now have 15 lines, covering all possbilities with at least one up to 4 special chars (should be the last line)