Using a combo of masks and rules

[guthawt]

That's pretty much how you have to do things with masks. Note that custom charsets support all the included charsets as well.

Instead of
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789!#$&-'"
you can use
?l?u?d!#$&-'"

For generating more complex hcmask files have a look at policygen from PACK: https://github.com/iphelix/PACK

Thanks!  I discovered the shorthand later and it does make things easier to read.  Although, I can see myself excluding some letters at some point so eventually I'll go back to longer charset lists.

so would using maskprocessor just be out of the question?  Am I attempting to use it in a way it wasn't really intended to be used?  Or maybe I'm justing using it wrong which is what's making it so slow.  PACK doesn't seem to have a "must include these characters" option so I don't see it generating what I need.  It also only seems to support the included charsets so I'd have to later convert all of those references to the custom one. :\