What's the point of a Mask?

[wifiguy]

You use the attack-mode "-a 3", which expects a mask.
You specify your mask by typing 18 times ?d in your command, so you give the instruction to Hashcat to use a 18-long-digits mask.
Now, since you only want to try from 8 till 15 digits without each time manually needing to change the command, one can use the "--increment" with min and a max.

Some suggestions to clean-up your command:
- why do you use the custom mask "-1 ?d"; it's pointless because your mask does not contain ?1 but only ?d
- hashcat rejects automatically for -m 22000 everything below 8 char; so the increment-min is not necessary

This would be my suggestion in order to crack from 8 till 15 chars:

Code:

hashcat.exe -m 22000 hash.22000 -a 3 ?d?d?d?d?d?d?d?d?d?d?d?d?d?d?d -i

adding ?1 in your mask means it can be any character right? uppercase, lowercase, number, special characters? And ?d is digits only right?

If say the password is in this format: K8f3!fAh@3
then shouldn't I set my mask to:
?1?1?1?1?1?1?1?1?1?1