Change profile folder in macOS?

[serious-business]

I'm using Sonoma 14.7.6 on an Intel Mac, and I just cloned and built hashcat v6.2.6-1259.  It's running as I type.

The problem is that hashcat is dumping all its files (potfile, kernel cache, and session files) into the top level of the cloned repo folder.  Especially with all the session files, it's going to get messy.

I created ~/.hashcat and ~/.local/share/hashcat before compilation, but it still just puts everything in the repo directory.

Is there a flag I can set or something before compiling to change this behaviour?

[atom]

On Linux and macOS, how you run hashcat makes a big difference. Specifically, whether you run it with ./hashcat or just hashcat affects its behavior.

By default, if you just extract the .7z (or compile from source) and run ./hashcat, it's set up to help new users get started quickly without needing a full install. But this also means hashcat stores files like kernels, potfiles, and sessions in the current directory.

If you want hashcat to act more like a system-installed tool and store its files in standard user home locations, you should run make install. After that, you can simply run hashcat (without the ./), and it will store things in your home directory, typically under $HOME/.local/share/hashcat.

On macOS (at least on my testing system), there's an extra step. You need to create the kernel cache directory manually.

$ mkdir -p $HOME/.cache/hashcat/kernels

Here's how it looks on my system (after make install):

$ mkdir x
$ cd x/
$ ls -l
total 0
$ hashcat -m 0 8743b52063cd84097a65d1633f5c74f5 -a 3 ?l?l?l?lcat
...
$ ls -l
total 0

Can you see no files have been created in the current working directory. The potfile is here:

$ cat $HOME/.local/share/hashcat/hashcat.potfile
8743b52063cd84097a65d1633f5c74f5:hashcat

[serious-business]

If you want hashcat to act more like a system-installed tool and store its files in standard user home locations, you should run make install.

Thank you, that's exactly what I was hoping for!  But the only reason I didn't try it myself was the GitHub build instructions, that state:

🔹 Step 6 (Optional): Install Hashcat (Linux only)

On my system, an Intel MacBook Pro running Sonoma 14.7.6, hashcat put everything in ~/.hashcat, including the kernel cache in ~/.hashcat/kernels/.  I didn't need to make the ~/.cache/hashcat/kernels/ folder.

Thanks again for the quick reply!