Why the .pot?

[mastercracker]

Hi all. What's the advantage of the .pot file? Why not only save the password instead of the Hashassword or Hash:Saltassword. It would be easier to automate. You copy/rename the password file (so that when you are cracking you are not modifying the password file) and point Hashcat programs to use the copied file as a dictionary. This way you don't need elaborate "de-poting" and can loop an attack with rules until it does not find any new cracks.

[unix-ninja]

For people running analytics, having the hash is extremely useful. Additionally, it's really only a single command in the terminal to "de-pot" as you put it. Nothing elaborate needs to be done.
additionally, you don't even need the pot for what you are talking about. You can simply tell hashcat to dump to stdout and pipe that to your automation mechanisms.

[atom]

The main reason for having a potfile in oclHashcat-plus is for --show and --left.