Change profile folder in macOS?

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On Linux and macOS, how you run hashcat makes a big difference. Specifically, whether you run it with ./hashcat or just hashcat affects its behavior.

By default, if you just extract the .7z (or compile from source) and run ./hashcat, it's set up to help new users get started quickly without needing a full install. But this also means hashcat stores files like kernels, potfiles, and sessions in the current directory.

If you want hashcat to act more like a system-installed tool and store its files in standard user home locations, you should run make install. After that, you can simply run hashcat (without the ./), and it will store things in your home directory, typically under $HOME/.local/share/hashcat.

On macOS (at least on my testing system), there's an extra step. You need to create the kernel cache directory manually.

$ mkdir -p $HOME/.cache/hashcat/kernels

Here's how it looks on my system (after make install):

$ mkdir x
$ cd x/
$ ls -l
total 0
$ hashcat -m 0 8743b52063cd84097a65d1633f5c74f5 -a 3 ?l?l?l?lcat
...
$ ls -l
total 0

Can you see no files have been created in the current working directory. The potfile is here:

$ cat $HOME/.local/share/hashcat/hashcat.potfile
8743b52063cd84097a65d1633f5c74f5:hashcat