Can hybrid attack work with rules?

[philsmd]

-k is applied only on the second dictionary. So it makes sense for instance with "-a 1 dict1.txt dict2.txt".

So technically it isn't ignored, it just not applied since there is no second dictionary (or better said, the right-hand side) in your particular case.

Btw. I am not quite sure why you insist to use -j d . If you want to "split" the rules, there is also another interesting feature called multi-rules: see https://hashcat.net/wiki/doku.php?id=rul...ulti-rules .
Basically, you can do -r append_num.rule -r duplicate.rule