09-14-2017, 04:09 PM
Yeah, that's true that there are 2 different escaping rules.
The one about the masks (?? for a literal "?") was always there: see https://hashcat.net/wiki/?id=mask_attack#masks
This is also how it works (and always worked) if you set a custom charset on the command line directly. e.g:
The \#, \, etc escaping was introduced when support for .hcmask files was added and by the time it felt to be the most frequently used one (also for other projects/standards) and easiest to understand.
It's true that in theory one single type of escaping and therefore a smaller/easier set of rules would maybe be possible if you design the whole syntax of both (custom charsets/masks and .hcmask files) today.
In my opinion it's not too much of a problem. Changing it would make a lot of .hcmask and commands unusable.
It's actually easy to think like this: whenever I put a literal ? I need to prepend another ? to make it ?? to diffentiate it from ?1/?2/?3/?4. This is true for masks/custom charsets, both within .hcmask files and also directly on command line. In addition to that we have to escape a "#" with "\#" if we want to have it at the beginning of the line and we need to escape all commas with "\," if we want the literal comma.
The one about the masks (?? for a literal "?") was always there: see https://hashcat.net/wiki/?id=mask_attack#masks
This is also how it works (and always worked) if you set a custom charset on the command line directly. e.g:
Quote:hashcat -m 0 -a 3 -2 ?? hash.txt ?2or a mask directly on the command line:
Quote:hashcat -m 0 -a 3 hash.txt ??
The \#, \, etc escaping was introduced when support for .hcmask files was added and by the time it felt to be the most frequently used one (also for other projects/standards) and easiest to understand.
It's true that in theory one single type of escaping and therefore a smaller/easier set of rules would maybe be possible if you design the whole syntax of both (custom charsets/masks and .hcmask files) today.
In my opinion it's not too much of a problem. Changing it would make a lot of .hcmask and commands unusable.
It's actually easy to think like this: whenever I put a literal ? I need to prepend another ? to make it ?? to diffentiate it from ?1/?2/?3/?4. This is true for masks/custom charsets, both within .hcmask files and also directly on command line. In addition to that we have to escape a "#" with "\#" if we want to have it at the beginning of the line and we need to escape all commas with "\," if we want the literal comma.