Confused by the suffixes and parameters

[epixoip]

How do I know which one I have to pick?

use the source, or guess intelligently

And do I have to put the hash + salt in a certain format?

yes, the format is hashalt

I'm pretty sure tho the password only contains letters, numbers, periods ( . ), and dashes/minuses ( - ). Also, for password acceptance there is no difference between upper case and lower case. How do I set this up, -1 $l$u$d.- doesn't seem to work...

you have the right idea, but you're not doing it right. first, it's ?, not $. second, you said there's no difference between ?l and ?u, so you wouldn't want to use both in your charset, you'd be increasing the keyspace for no reason.

so based on what you said above, you'd want to use a custom charset of -1 ?u?d.-